loris has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear All,

I am parsing some HTML with HTML::Parser and need to convert the ampersands and umlauts from stuff like & and ü to something more reasonable (in my case, Excel-friendly).

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks,

loris

"It took Loris ten minutes to eat a satsuma . . . twenty minutes to get from one end of his branch to the other . . . and an hour to scratch his bottom. But Slow Loris didn't care. He had a secret . . ." (from "Slow Loris" by Alexis Deacon)

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Re: Convert & to & etc.
by poolpi (Hermit) on Feb 07, 2008 at 12:52 UTC
[reply]

      Thanks, that works fine for the ampersands, but not for my umlauts. I assume this is because, say, ü is encoded not as ü, but as ü, whatever that is. Do you know what sort of encoding this is and how I can deal with it?

      Thanks,

      loris

      "It took Loris ten minutes to eat a satsuma . . . twenty minutes to get from one end of his branch to the other . . . and an hour to scratch his bottom. But Slow Loris didn't care. He had a secret . . ." (from "Slow Loris" by Alexis Deacon)
[reply]
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[select]
        When you parse websites you have to consult the HTTP headers (and perhaps the http-equiv meta tags) to find out which charset it is in.

        Then you can use Encode::decode to transform it into something useful.

        (Perhaps inspecting a hexdump of the string helps you to find out which charset it is in).

[reply]

        If you are using Spreadsheet::WriteExcel, you can use its functionality directly:

          use Spreadsheet::WriteExcel;
  use HTML::Entities;
  use Encode qw( from_to );

  from_to (decode_entities ($value), "utf-8", "ucs2");
  $wks->write_unicode ($column, $row, $value);

        [download]

        Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn
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Re: Convert & to & etc.
by moritz (Cardinal) on Feb 07, 2008 at 12:52 UTC
[reply]

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