Rending HTML Entities in HTMLtext in fields

[Sarah Reichelt]

On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 7:18 AM, Sivakatirswami<katir at hindu.org> wrote:
> Is there a way to get htmlEntities
>
> "“Kanwar”
>
> The rest of their lifestyle — names, marriage rituals, dressing styles
> — continued to be the same...."
>
> to appear correctly in a field where such enties are  part of the html used
> to set the htmltext of a field?


I had to wrestle with this recently and after numerous attempts with
uniencode, unidecode, macToISO etc., I ended up writing my own
function to do it:

function decodeEntities pText
   if pText contains "&#" is false then return pText

   set the useunicode to true
   put empty into tNew
   repeat until pText is empty
      put char 1 of pText into c
      if c <> "&" then
         put c after tNew
         delete char 1 of pText
      else
         put empty into tCode
         delete char 1 to 2 of pText
         repeat until char 1 of pText = ";"
            put char 1 of pText after tCode
            delete char 1 of pText
            if pText is empty then exit repeat
         end repeat
         delete char 1 of pText
         put numtochar(tCode) into tChar
         set the unicodetext of the templatefield to tChar
         put the text of the templatefield after tNew
      end if
   end repeat

   set the useunicode to true

   return tNew
end decodeEntities

Use it like this:        put decodeEntities("“Kanwar&#8221")
which returns:         “Kanwar” (curly opening & closing quotes which
may not show in the email).

I feel sure that there must be a better method, but until someone
discovers it, this function seems to do the job.

Cheers,
Sarah