readme

Explanation

I'm trying to grab a string from a database, which may any type of characters in it, and display it as HTML.

Therefore need to replace characters like 1/2 signs and curly quotes with their respective HTML character entities.

EDIT: Unfortunately, I've just found that the code snippet below works fine, it must be the way I'm calling the 
method in the full script, which is much larger, sigh.

html_entity-replace.rb

def html_entity_escape(string)
  fixed = string.to_s.gsub(/&/, "&").gsub(/½/, "½").gsub(/¼/, "¼").gsub(/¾/, "¾").gsub(/“/, "“").gsub(/”/, "”").gsub(/’/, "’").gsub(/‘/, "‘")
  #fixed = string.to_s.gsub(/38/, "&").gsub(/189/, "½").gsub(/188/, "¼").gsub(/190/, "¾").gsub(/8220/, "“").gsub(/8221/, "”").gsub(/8217/, "’").gsub(/8216/, "‘")
  return fixed
end

blahblah = "only 3 breaks of ½ hour, worked for 16 ¼ hours, had a break of 8 ¼ hours"

puts html_entity_escape(blahblah)