Decode HTML Entities

Download Chilkat Charset ActiveX

Visual Basic example program showing how to decode HTML entities.

    Dim cc As New ChilkatCharset2
    cc.UnlockComponent "anything for 30-day trial"

    ' This file can be downloaded from:
    ' http://www.chilkatsoft.com/text-samples/html_entities.txt
    ' The html_entities.txt file contains lines such as:
    ' pound sign  £     £  £        
    ' cent sign   ¢  ¢  ¢        
    ' pound sign  £     £  £        
    ' currency sign   ¤    ¤  ¤        
    ' yen sign = yuan sign    ¥   ¥  ¥        
    ' Latin small letter ae = Latin small ligature ae     æ     æ  æ        
    ' Latin small letter c with cedilla   ç    ç  ç        
    ' Latin small letter e with grave     è    è  è        
    ' Latin small letter e with acute     é    é  é        
    ' Latin small letter e with circumflex    ê     ê  ê        
    ' Latin small letter e with diaeresis     ë  ë  ë        
    ' Latin small letter i with grave     ì    ì  ì        
    ' Latin small letter i with acute     í    í  í        
    ' Latin small letter i with circumflex    î     î  î        
    ' Latin small letter i with diaeresis     ï  ï  ï        
    ' Latin small letter eth  ð   ð  ð        
    
    ' First, load the text file into a VB string:
    Dim textData As Variant
    textData = cc.ReadFile("html_entities.txt")
    cc.FromCharset = "iso-8859-1"
    Text3.Text = cc.ConvertToUnicode(textData)
    
    ' Because HTML entities may represent characters in any language,
    ' the result of the entity decoding is always utf-8.
    ' Therefore, we first decode and then convert to a VB string (from utf-8)
    Dim decoded As Variant
    decoded = cc.HtmlEntityDecode(Text3.Text)
    cc.FromCharset = "utf-8"
    Text4.Text = cc.ConvertToUnicode(decoded)

    ' Alternatively, we can decode the entities directly from file-to-file:
    cc.ToCharset = "iso-8859-1"
    cc.HtmlEntityDecodeFile "html_entities.txt", "html_entities_decoded.txt"