I've looked all over CPAN, but I can't find a module that offers a standard way of performing this simple transformation.

To transform an XML entity like 

    ü

[download]
into the corresponding utf-8-encoded Unicode character, the following substitution can be used, given that the string this is performed on is a Unicode string: 
    s/&#x([0-9a-f]+);/chr(hex($1))/ige

[download]
Now, instead of having to write this snippet down over and over again, I'd prefer something like 
    use URI::Escape;
    $str  = uri_unescape($safe);

[download]
which I use all the time, not because URL-unescaping is terribly complicated, but because for such a common operation there ought to be a standard procedure.

So ... is there a module on CPAN that does something similar? If not, I'll be happy to put one up there.

By the way, XML::DOM provides a function called XmlUtf8Encode which does a lot more than calling chr(), but I guess that's because it tries to cope with older perl releases that didn't support Unicode well. Any insight on this would be appreciated as well.

(Hex-entity corrected, thanks eserte.)

In reply to Decode XML &#xxxx; entities by saintmike

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