How to add non-escaped ampersands to HTML with Nokogiri::XML::Builder

Question

I would like to add things like bullet points \"•\" to HTML using the XML Builder in Nokogiri, but everything is being escaped. How do I prevent it from being escaped

Answer 1

If you define

  class Nokogiri::XML::Builder
    def entity(code)
      doc = Nokogiri::XML("&##{code};")
      insert(doc.root.children.first)
    end
  end

then this

  builder = Nokogiri::XML::Builder.new do |xml|
    xml.span {
      xml.text "I can has "
      xml.entity 8665
      xml.text " entity?"
    }
  end
  puts builder.to_xml

yields

I can has • entity?

 

PS this a workaround only, for a clean solution please refer to the libxml2 documentation (Nokogiri is built on libxml2) for more help. However, even these folks admit that handling entities can be quite ..err, cumbersome sometimes.