bad regular expression in html2text library causes text to go missing from forum emails

Greetings.. I believe I've found and fixed a bug in the html2text library.

In /lib/html2text.php...
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478 // Remove unknown/unhandled entities (this cannot be done in search-and-replace block)
479 $text = preg_replace('/&[^&;]+;/i', '', $text);
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That regular expression is too greedy... it matches any sequence of characters that starts with an ampersand and ends with a semicolon.

We've had numerous reports from users that huge chunks of forum posts are missing from the plain-text emails they receive by subscription.

The problem occurs when someone happens to include an ampersand in their text, and also a semicolon somewhere. Anything between those two characters is filtered out.

Here's an example...

Gin & Tonic

• 2oz gin;
• 5oz tonic water;
• 5 cubes of ice;
• 1 lime wedge.

if you ran that through html2text, it would output this..

Gin

• 5oz tonic water;
• 5 cubes of ice;
• 1 lime wedge.

The simple fix I am testing now is this:
479 $text = preg_replace('/&[^&;\s]+;/i', '', $text);

The additional \s makes sure the match stops on whitespace.

Best regards,
-Garret