HTML::Entities(3)

NAME
HTML::Entities - Encode or decode strings with HTML entities

SYNOPSIS
 use HTML::Entities;

 $a = "V&aring;re norske tegn b&oslash;r &#230res";
 decode_entities($a);
 encode_entities($a, "\200-\377");

DESCRIPTION
This module deals with encoding and decoding of strings with HTML character entities. The module provides the following functions:

decode_entities($string)
    This routine replaces HTML entities found in the $string with the corresponding ISO-8859/1 (or with perl-5.7 or better Unicode) character. Unrecognized entities are left alone.

encode_entities($string, [$unsafe_chars])
    This routine replaces unsafe characters in $string with their entity representation. A second argument can be given to specify which characters to concider as unsafe. The default set of characters to expand are control chars, high-bit chars and the '<', '&', '>' and '"' characters.

Both routines modify the string passed as the first argument if called in a void context. In scalar and array contexts the encoded or decoded string is returned (and the argument string is left unchanged).

If you prefer not to import these routines into your namespace you can call them as:

  use HTML::Entities ();
  $encoded = HTML::Entities::encode($a);
  $decoded = HTML::Entities::decode($a);

The module can also export the %char2entity and the %entity2char hashes which contain the mapping from all characters to the corresponding entities.

COPYRIGHT
Copyright 1995-2001 Gisle Aas. All rights reserved.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.