How to add non-escaped ampersands to HTML with Nokogiri::XML::Builder

Question

I would like to add things like bullet points \"•\" to HTML using the XML Builder in Nokogiri, but everything is being escaped. How do I prevent it from being escaped

Answer 1

When you're setting the text of an element, you really are setting text, not HTML source. < and & don't have any special meaning in plain text.

So just type a bullet: '•'. Of course your source code and your XML file will have to be using the same encoding for that to come out right. If your XML file is UTF-8 but your source code isn't, you'd probably have to say '\xe2\x80\xa2' which is the UTF-8 byte sequence for the bullet character as a string literal.

(In general non-ASCII characters in Ruby 1.8 are tricky. The byte-based interfaces don't mesh too well with XML's world of all-text-is-Unicode.)