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I am noob on Unix. I've a very unique problem where and really appreciate your help. I need to parse string containing hash code value and convert the hash code is equivalent char representation. Here is the example code of it. 

I see that you#39;re eligible to get ticket for show on your device#44;

now, the script should output to 

I see that you're eligible to get ticket for show on your device,
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Is this html encoding? –  richard Jan 21 at 21:23
    
yes, it uses the html entity encoding style but without the &. –  pratikch Jan 21 at 21:29
1  
There are tools that can do html decoding, so use sed to convert it to “proper” html encoding, then put it through one of these decoders. –  richard Jan 21 at 21:34
    
How do you get from 146 to ` (grave accent, U+0060)? Or do you mean ’ (right single quotation mark), which is at 146 in the ibm-cp1252 character set for instance? –  Stéphane Chazelas Jan 21 at 22:16
    
After your edit, that still doesn't add up. HTML ’ is a control character, ` is ` (backtick, grave accent), ' (apostrophe) is ', ’ (right single quotation mark) is ’. –  Stéphane Chazelas Jan 22 at 12:46

1 Answer 1

up vote 1 down vote accepted

perl is good for this:

$ str='I see that you#146;re eligible to get ticket for show on your device#44;'
$ perl -pe 's/#(\d+);/chr($1)/ge' <<<"$str"
I see that you’re eligible to get ticket for show on your device,

I had to set my terminal's encoding to WINDOWS-1252 to get that output. Decimal 146 is not a valid ISO-8859-1 character.

To treat those codes as HTML entities, we'll add the missing ampersand, and decode:

perl -MHTML::Entities -lne 's/(#\d+;)/&$1/g; print decode_entities($_)' <<<"$str"
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Thank you for your answer, but can't use anything other than simple shell script :( –  pratikch Jan 21 at 21:36
    
you need to output character with code point 146, not byte 146. (This will be a 2 byte code in utf-8) –  richard Jan 21 at 21:36
    
Yes I agree, this uses UTF encoding. Sorry If I've missed to mention that. –  pratikch Jan 21 at 21:39
    
There's a great number of charset that have RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK on 146, not only windows-1252 (all the other windows-125x as well for instance). Of course, using that character here is wrong, the OP should use the apostrophe ' instead. –  Stéphane Chazelas Jan 21 at 22:07
    
agree, corrected the question. –  pratikch Jan 22 at 4:07

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