[SOLVED] Converting escaped XML entities back into UTF-8

Converting escaped XML entities back into UTF-8

So I've got this UTF-8 string in an XML file:

Horrible place. ☠☠☠

And when I feed it to an external application, the funny characters come back escaped as XML entities:

Horrible place. &#x2620;&#x2620;&#x2620;

In Ruby, how do I convert that string back to UTF-8? There's probably a really easy solution for this, but I'm unable to find anything in the standard libraries; eg. CGI.unescapeHTML (which work nicely for things like >) seem to ignore them completely.

ree-1.8.7-2010.02 > CGI.unescapeHTML('&gt;')
 => ">" 
ree-1.8.7-2010.02 > CGI.unescapeHTML('&#x2620;')
 => "&#x2620;"

Solution

Well, since it's XML encoded I'd go for an XML parser:

require 'nokogiri'

frag = 'Horrible place. &#x2620;&#x2620;&#x2620;'
doc = Nokogiri::XML.fragment(frag)
puts doc.text
# >> Horrible place. ☠☠☠