Bash script to convert from HTML entities to characters - Stack Overflow

Bash script to convert from HTML entities to characters - Stack Overflow

21down votefavorite 6	I'm looking for a way to turn this: hello &lt; world to this: hello < world I could use sed with a bunch of substitutions, but isn't there a tool that will do that for me in one go? html bash html-escape-characters shareimprove this question edited May 26 '11 at 15:59 Whitecat 1,14511331 asked May 8 '11 at 18:45 Marko 113115
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up vote36down vote	Try recode: $ echo '&lt;' |recode html..ascii < shareimprove this answer answered May 8 '11 at 18:49 ceving 5,51313063
	1   link seems dead now – uglycoyote Apr 8 '15 at 16:44 1   @uglycoyote Unfortunately. The Debian package might be a good alternative source:packages.debian.org/en/sid/recode. There is also a copy at Github: github.com/pinard/Recode – ceving Apr 13 '15 at 9:25  add a comment

up vote18down vote

With perl: cat foo.html | perl -MHTML::Entities -e 'while(<>) {print decode_entities($_);}' With php from the command line: cat foo.html | php -r 'while(($line=fgets(STDIN)) !== FALSE) echo html_entity_decode($line, ENT_QUOTES|ENT_HTML401);' shareimprove this answer edited Oct 20 '15 at 19:01 evandrix 3,13821327 answered Oct 31 '12 at 15:45 user1788934 18112

1   The PHP one is not working for certain characters such as &nbsp; – Romain Paulus Dec 20 '13 at 5:13 3   Shorter Perl version: perl -MHTML::Entities -pe 'decode_entities($_);' – RobEarl Aug 7 '14 at 8:48 1   I'll give you an upvote if you remove the useless use of cat (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_(Unix)#Useless_use_of_cat) :-) – 0x89 Aug 19 '14 at 9:10 Use perl -C -MHTML::Entities -pe 'decode_entities($_);' < foo.html to output UTF-8 (see this question) – tricasse Oct 2 '15 at 9:15 add a comment

up vote12down vote	An alternative is to pipe through a web browser -- such as: echo '!' | w3m -dump -T text/html This worked great for me in cygwin, where downloading and installing distributions are difficult. This answer was found here shareimprove this answer answered May 26 '11 at 15:50 Whitecat 1,14511331
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up vote10down vote	Using xmlstarlet: echo 'hello < world' | xmlstarlet unesc shareimprove this answer answered May 9 '11 at 10:47 user243 1012
	2   Note that this does not work for hexa entities like :. – v6ak Aug 13 '13 at 21:00