Some special symbols are frequently specified in HTML documents using HTML entities, this entities take the form &name;, like © for the copyright character.
In addition, any character can be specified in HTML in the form of numerical entities, that take the form &#number;, like © for the copyright character.
To convert this kind of HTML data to/from standard characters, you can use the functions 'decode_entities' and 'encode_entities' from HTML::Entities module.
$to_decode = "an HTML string - <© TVS>";
$decoded = decode_entities($to_decode);
print "original data --> $to_decode\n";
print "decoded data --> $decoded\n";