How to unescape HTML character entities in Java?

Question

Basically I would like to decode a given Html document, and replace all special chars, such as \" \" -> \" \", \">\" -

Answer 1

The most reliable way is with

String cleanedString = StringEscapeUtils.unescapeHtml4(originalString);

from org.apache.commons.lang3.StringEscapeUtils.

And to escape the whitespaces

cleanedString = cleanedString.trim();

This will ensure that whitespaces due to copy and paste in web forms to not get persisted in DB.