I just tried; it doesn't do it. irb(main):004:0> CGI.escapeHTML( "<br>") => "<br>" irb(main):005:0> CGI.escapeHTML( "<br>\251") => "<br>\251" On Oct 16, 2004, at 2:15 AM, Patrick May wrote: > On Friday, October 15, 2004, at 08:38 PM, Francis Hwang wrote: > >> I asked this a little while back but maybe didn't ask the right way, >> so maybe somebody can help me if I rephrase: >> >> I'm trying to build an RSS feed that takes, in its item descriptions, >> ISO-8859-1 text. (I'm using REXML for now.) I'd like to be able to >> take a non-ASCII character and turn it into a usable XML entity. So, >> for example, "\251" would get turned into "©": >> >> str = "\251 2004 Francis Hwang" >> elt = REXML::Element.new( 'elt' ) >> elt.text = str >> elt.to_s >> => "<elt>\251 2004 Francis Hwang</elt>" >> # But I want "<elt>© 2004 Francis Hwang</elt>" >> >> Is there some sort of setting I can twiddle in REXML so that I can >> assign a text that includes these sorts of characters, and REXML will >> know to turn them into entities on output? I know I can do this by >> hand and then prevent escaping by use the :raw flag, but I'd like to >> avoid that if possible. > > I think there's an escapeHTML function on the CGI that might do it. > Of course, it will also hit the > and <. You could still lift > the code from there. > > ~ pat > >