title: How do i remove &#x2002; &#x2014; &#x2013; special characters from my XML files
body: <p>this is a sample of the xml file</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;row tnote="0"&gt;
  &lt;entry namest="col2" nameend="col4" us="none" emph="bld"&gt;&lt;blst&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;text&gt;Single, head of household, or qualifying widow(er)&amp;#x2014;$55,000&lt;/text&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;li&gt;&lt;text&gt;Married filing jointly&amp;#x2014;$115,000&lt;/text&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  &lt;/blst&gt;&lt;/entry&gt;
  &lt;entry colname="col6" ldr="1" valign="middle"&gt;&amp;#x2002;&lt;/entry&gt;
  &lt;entry colname="col7" valign="middle"&gt; 5.&lt;/entry&gt;
  &lt;/row&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>the <code>&amp;#x2014;</code> etc represent HTML 4.0 entities. i want to store each line's text as an element of an array, but not if the line is just <code>&amp;#x2002;</code></p>
  
  <pre><code>if e.text.strip =~ /^&amp;#x20[0-9][0-9];$/ then
  next
  else
  subLines &lt;&lt; e.text
  end
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>but it doesn't seem to be working...is my regEx incorrect?</p>