Unescape characters from XML::Twig

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

There must be an easy way to do this, but I can't figure it out... I have characters like '>' and '"' in my XML and when I try to get the text from XML::Twig, it doesn't unescape those characters. This seems like something that everybody would want to happen for them, so how do I get them unescaped? Here's my sample code and results:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl5 -w

use XML::Twig;

my $twig = new XML::Twig( TwigRoots => { "LINK" => 1 } );
$twig->parse( "<?xml version=\"1.0\"?><TEST><LINK><TITLE>This &lt; is 
+a &gt; &quot;test&apos; &amp; don&apos;t you forget it</TITLE></LINK>
+</TEST>" );
my $root = $twig->root;
my @links = $root->children;
print $links[0]->first_child_text( "TITLE" ), "\n";


Results:
This &lt; is a &gt; &quot;test&apos; &amp; don&apos;t you forget it
[download]

Comment on Unescape characters from XML::Twig Download Code

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Re: Unescape characters from XML::Twig by mirod (Canon) on Apr 20, 2001 at 20:03 UTC
My mistake! When I first wrote XML::Twig I only used it to output back XML. Outputting HTML or plain text came later. So there you have a bug! The next version (XML::Twig 3.0) will fix this. I will properlly store the ' as... ' and only turn it into ' when using the print or sprint methods, the text one will leave it as ' In the meantime you can unescape the text using this: `sub unescape { my $text= shift; $text=~ s/</>/g; $text=~ s/>/</g; $text=~ s/"/"/g; $text=~ s/'/'/g; $text=~ s/&/&/; return $text; }` [download] By the way, if you have tag-heavy XML you can also use CDATA sections: if you replace your string by the following one it will work (nearly, there is a definite bug there, as opposed to a poor design decision, which turns the & into &): `qq{<?xml version=\"1.0\"?><TEST><LINK><TITLE><![CDATA[This < is a > " test ' & don't you forget it]]></TITLE></LINK></TEST>}`	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Re: Unescape characters from XML::Twig by nardo (Friar) on Apr 20, 2001 at 21:24 UTC
Minor correction, the line: `$text=~ s/&/&/;` should be: `$text=~ s/&/&/g;`.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Unescape characters from XML::Twig by arturo (Vicar) on Apr 20, 2001 at 19:39 UTC
You can use the `decode_entities` function from HTML::Entities to do this if there's no method in XML::Twig. But I believe a /msg to XML::Twig's author might be in order if you don't find anything in the documentation or the source code to the module. HTH	[reply] [d/l]