Is there a better HTML escaping and unescaping tool than CGI for Ruby?

Question

CGI.escapeHTML is pretty bad, but CGI.unescapeHTML is completely borked. For example:

require \'cgi\'

CGI.unescapeHTML(\'…\         


        

Answer 1

The htmlentities gem should do the trick:

require 'rubygems'
require 'htmlentities'

coder = HTMLEntities.new

coder.decode('…') # => "…"
coder.decode('…') # => "…"
coder.decode('¢') # => "¢"
coder.decode('¢') # => "¢"
coder.encode("…", :named) # => "…"
coder.encode("…", :decimal) # => "…"

Answer 2

require 'rubygems'
require 'hpricot'

Hpricot('…', :xhtml_strict => true).to_plain_text

Though you might have to fiddle around with the character encoding.