How can I decode HTML entities?

Question

Here\'s a quick Perl question:

How can I convert HTML special characters like ü or ' to normal ASCII text?

I started

Answer 1

There are a handful of predefined HTML entities - & " > and so on - that you could hard code.

However, the larger case of numberic entities - { - is going to be much harder, as those values are Unicode, and conversion to ASCII is going to range from difficult to impossible.