How to unescape HTML character entities in Java?

Question

Basically I would like to decode a given Html document, and replace all special chars, such as \" \" -> \" \", \">\" -

Answer 1

The libraries mentioned in other answers would be fine solutions, but if you already happen to be digging through real-world html in your project, the Jsoup project has a lot more to offer than just managing "ampersand pound FFFF semicolon" things.

// textValue: 
This is a sample. \"Granny\" Smith –.<\/p>\r\n
// becomes this: This is a sample. "Granny" Smith –.
// with one line of code:
// Jsoup.parse(textValue).getText(); // for older versions of Jsoup
Jsoup.parse(textValue).text();

// Another possibility may be the static unescapeEntities method:
boolean strictMode = true;
String unescapedString = org.jsoup.parser.Parser.unescapeEntities(textValue, strictMode);

And you also get the convenient API for extracting and manipulating data, using the best of DOM, CSS, and jquery-like methods. It's open source and MIT licence.