Decode HTML Entities to UTF-8 in groovy

Question

I am not sure how to decode the html entities to UTF-8 in groovy?

"& quot;"

should be decoded as " in groovy program.

Can anyone help me with this solution?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/994331/java-how-to-decode-html-character-entities-in-java-like-httputility-htmldecode — tim_yates, Jul 28 '15 at 11:20
Is there any other solutions for it ? some cases, the unescapeHTML method is not working properly — VIJAYKUMAR SUBRAMANI, Jul 28 '15 at 12:02
Because in some cases you don't actually have encoded HTML but want to decode it anyway? — doelleri, Jul 28 '15 at 14:14

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 05 '15 at 15:04

For semantic correctness: What you actually want to do is not to change the encoding, but to parse the markup.

(I may go to the engineers hell for giving you the following solution, but you might actually do this if you insist on staying with the Groovy-essentials to solve your problem.)

You can surround your string or character with a valid html-tag and utilize the XMLSlurper to parse the input for you. For your example string, it looks like this:

import groovy.util.XmlSlurper // comes with Groovy (using 2.4.4)

def myString = "& quot;".replace(" ","") // your string + replaced whitespaces for correct parsing
def embeddedString = "<tag>" + myString + "</tag>" // tag name can be any name

def tmp = new XmlSlurper().parseText(embeddedString)
println tmp // prints """

The output is what you desired. (and now I may burn)

Just a heads up - this crashed for me with ` `. The slurper seems to recognize all the other entities I've thrown at it, though, so a simple `myString = myString.replaceAll(" ", " ");` before `def embeddedString = ...` should fix things up. — Sandy Gifford, Nov 07 '16 at 15:15

Decode HTML Entities to UTF-8 in groovy

1 Answers1