Suggestion: Normalize HTML/XML entities

[lionel-rowe]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Often, when consuming HTML or XML files from external sources, it's desirable to normalize the entities. For example, I'm interacting with an API that produces XML where all non-ASCII characters are encoded as numbered entities, making non-Latin-script text completely unreadable. I want to debug and store these files in a format that's human-readable as well as machine-readable, while remaining valid UTF-8 XML.

Describe the solution you'd like

Currently, html/entities exports escape and unescape functions. I suggest exporting a third function (tentatively named normalize) that normalizes all entities in a string of HTML or XML to a form that's valid, interoperable, and (mostly) human-readable:

normalize('<p>&#x4e24;&#x53ea;&#x5c0f;&#x871c;&#x8702;</p>') // '<p>两只小蜜蜂</p>'
normalize('a&b') // 'a&amp;b'
normalize('&#62;&#x3e;&gt;') // '&gt;&gt;&gt;'
normalize('&apos;') // '&#39;'

Describe alternatives you've considered

It might be worth having multiple normalized forms (which would likely also affect the API surface area of escape); for example, a "readability" form that converts 两只小蜜蜂 to 两只小蜜蜂 vs a "compatibility" form that converts in the opposite direction. I don't currently have a use case for the "compatibility" form as any XML-consuming APIs I need to interact with either default to UTF-8 or respect UTF-8 where specified, but it might be useful for users needing to interact with legacy or poorly-designed APIs.