Rails - May 2006 - HTMLEntities.decode_entities - problems with output

All,

I am trying to use the HTMLEntities library to translate HTML entities 
into their character equivalents so that I can print a text version of 
some HTML to a file.

However, I am having trouble understanding how to successfully emit the 
converted text as a string without ending up with weird UTF-8 characters 
in front of the converted characters.

Referencing the irb session below, I''m attempting to do the Iconv 
conversion from ASCII to UTF-8 because I''m assuming that I have to in 
order to use the HTMLEntities calls.  I am trying to convert back to 
ISO-8859-1 because I''m assuming that I need to.

If I just try to print the output of HTMLEntities.decode_entities to a 
file without doing any iconv conversions, I get A-circumflex before 
every modified character.  A-circumflex is the ISO-8859-1 equivalent of 
\302.

What am I missing here?  How can I successfully display   as a 
space in a file that I am writing to?  I''d rather not have to my own 
gsubs on each character entity, although I am prepared to do that.

I also thought of substituting the \302 character with '''' (if
I could
only figure out how to do that).

Any help is appreciated,
Wes

=============================================================================
C:\eclipse\workspace>irb
irb(main):001:0> require ''iconv''
=> true
irb(main):002:0> require ''rubygems''
=> false
irb(main):003:0> require ''HTMLEntities''
=> true
irb(main):004:0> x = '' xyz''
=> " xyz"
irb(main):006:0> conv = Iconv.new("ASCII", "UTF-8")
=> #<Iconv:0x2c297f8>
irb(main):007:0> y = conv.iconv(x)
=> "&nbsp;xyz"
irb(main):008:0> HTMLEntities.decode_entities(y)
=> "\302\240xyz"
irb(main):009:0> conv = Iconv.new("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1")
=> #<Iconv:0x2c12ed8>
irb(main):010:0> conv.iconv(y)
=> "&nbsp;xyz"


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