How to convert MS Word special characters to HTML codes?

Hi there, I have been pouring over a character conversion problem for
a day now and need some help. I created a ruby script that scans an
Excel spreadsheet and puts the content into a custom XML file. (works
fine) I am using Ruby 1.9.2.

When I tried importing the XML file into the destination program, it
fails. It turns out the Excel spreadsheet data had some text copied
from MS Word and so every now and then there is an embedded 'long
dash' or ellipses character that is above the regular ascii set, so
the import function fails due to these unexpected binary characters.

I can find these lines and specific characters when the script reads
the data. What I'd *like* to do is convert these special (unicode)
characters to their HTML equivalents. After hours of searching blog
posts and skimming through old posts here, I am still stuck.

If I can't find a way to convert these characters, I'll just remove
them. I'd really like to try and keep them somehow.

Can someone please help point me to some references or offer some
advice on how I can convert them to HTML or ascii equivalents?

Here's an example. In ruby 1.9.2, I see the following line in my
output file:

"* \x85 ellipsis\n"

-> according to an HTML lookup table, I could replace \x85 with
…

Is there an easy way to convert these characters? I've tried the CGI
and ICONV libraries and they both skip over these characters. I would
prefer to have a routine that can find and replace each of the special
characters rather than write a regex for each character myself. I have
encountered 5 special characters so far. There might be more as I go
through the data.

Suggestions?

TIA.

Paul.

Nevermind. I think I figured out the problem.

While creating my script, I ran it from SciTE (version 3.0.4 in win7).
Something about running the script from that environment works
differently than when I run it from the command line.

When I run the script from the command line, everything works
correctly and the CGI library converts the characters well enough.

No worries.