Disabling XML character escaping for to_xml

[Nate Wiger]

Currently, it appears to_xml will automatically escape any entities
into their corresponding &XXX representation. There's a piece in the
documentation that says "If $KCODE is set to u and encoding set to
UTF8, then escaping will NOT be performed."

Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be the case. Even after
following the docs and ensuring that default_charset is indeed UTF-8
(actually the default for Rails nowadays), we still get encoded
characters in to_xml output.

Since our client is UTF-8 aware, we need to pass thru the UTF-8 data
intact. The only way we've found to do this is thru the following
horrible monkey-patch:

module Builder
class XmlBase
def _escape(text)
text
end
end
end

What's the proper way to do this?

Thanks,
Nate

[pru...@gmail.com]

I had the same issue, but eventually putting

$KCODE='UTF8'

in my config/environment.rb solved the issue.

Greetings,

Wouter

[pru...@gmail.com]

Just deployed to a production server, but it doesn't work there,
although the rails version is the same. Maybe it's the ruby version
(1.8.7 locally and 1.8.6 on the server)

[BobiJo]

I have the same issue,
$KCODE='UTF8' by default, but I set it anyway in environment.rb
This didn't solve my problem, I applied the patch and it worked,
It's not the ideal solution, but it gets the job done :)
I've tried the multibyte chars thing and it didn't work eather.

May the source be with you

[mcginniwa]

Any word on if this is fixed in Edge/Rails 2.2?

Cheers,
Walter

[mcginniwa]

Actually, the monkey patch solution sort of sucks. It turns off ALL
escaping, not just turning off utf to entities escaping.

So this is fine:

<dc:description>māori</dc:description>

but this is not:

<dc:description><p>āēīōū</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p></dc:description>

The html tags SHOULD be escaped, while the unicode characters
shouldn't be. My work around will simply be to strip out the embedded
HTML, but this a problem that people should be aware of when using the
monkey patch.

Cheers,
Watler

[Frederick Cheung]

On Nov 11, 10:16 pm, mcginniwa <walter.mcgin...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The html tags SHOULD be escaped, while the unicode characters
> shouldn't be.  My work around will simply be to strip out the embedded
> HTML, but this a problem that people should be aware of when using the
> monkey patch.
>

Many moons ago I overrode the String#to_xs method that builder adds to
just escape the vitals (ie &<>'" ) instead of all the extra stuff it
does.

Fred

> Cheers,
> Watler

[Walter McGinnis]

Yeah, I ended up doing that basically, but in some specific helpers.  My coworker refined it though using the htmlentities plugin.  You can see it here:

http://github.com/kete/kete/tree/master/lib/oai_dc_helpers.rb#L135

Long term we may do this for all the xml values, not just our dc:description element.  So it might move up to monkey patching builder or more general spot or something.

Cheers,

Walter