Convert character entities to their unicode equivalents

Question

I have html encoded strings in a database, but many of the character entities are not just the standard & and <. Entities like

Answer 1

you can download a local copy of the appropriate HTML and/or XHTML DTDs from the W3C. Then set up an XmlResolver and use it to expand any entities found in the document.

You could use a regular expression to find/expand the entities, but that won't know anything about context (e.g., anything in a CDATA section shouldn't be expanded).