Wise monks, I've got one for you.

I'm developing a content management system where the data are all stored in XML files. Everything is groovy with one exception: if a user tries to submit a web page with control characters (such as \x92 for single right quote) in it, then the XML Parser (XML::Simple, which uses XML::Parser) coughs, sputters and dies.

So, what I'd like to do is have a single regexp just go through and change all the \xNN characters to their XHTML entity equivalent. For instance, the single character \x92 would become ’.

My problem is that I can't seem to get something along these lines to work:

s/\x(\d+)/'&#' . hex($1) . ';'/ge

I think I know why this doesn't work (because the \d+ is searching for multiple digit characters whereas what I want is to find the single character specified by an expression like \x92 or \x93).

If I can avoid doing it, I'd rather not do something like: 

for (127 .. 255) {
 my $regexp = "s/\\x" . sprintf("%lx", $_) . "/&#$_;/g";
 eval "$block =~ $regexp;";
}

[download]

Perhaps there is a solution involving pack(), though it hasn't occurred to me yet.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

In reply to Control Characters (\xNN) in HTML by garliqua

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