Hacksaw replacing "&" with "&"

Question

I'm using the Hacksaw plugin to truncate text and it does a great job except instead of rendering HTML entities such as "&", it's outputting them as "&". How can I correct this? Putting them in allow="" doesn't work. Do I need to do something to manipulate the text string first before applying the Hacksaw filter? Or is there a Hacksaw option that would correct this?

Edit for more info...

Example of text as it should appear:

Colour & Light; A House Re-crafted, cover & pg.99-108

Example of text output from Hacksaw:

Colour & Light; A House Re-crafted, cover & pg.99-108

Stupidly I hadn't looked at the HTML until now. It looks like the first & is rendering correctly but then there's a second partial entity after it?!

Template code I've tried:

{% set summary = article.newsArticle.type('text').first().text|hacksaw(words='35', append='...') %}

{% set summary = article.newsArticle.type('text').first().text|hacksaw(words='35', append='...')|raw %}

{% set summary = article.newsArticle.type('text').first().text|raw|hacksaw(words='35', append='...') %}

The order of plugin doesn't appear to have any effect. I get same result with all three of these arrangment above, including no Raw plugin at all.

Edit for answer

As per accepted answer below, final working code is:

{% set summary = article.newsArticle.type('text').first().text|htmlEntityDecode|hacksaw(words='35', append='...') %}

The Craft Helpers plugins did the trick.

Answer 1

You could try to fight that ampersand with the htmlEntityDecode filter that is included in my Craft Helpers plugin https://github.com/carlcs/craft-helpers

Answer 2

Try using the raw twig filter.

{{ variable|hacksaw(words='100')|raw }}

I did not test this answer since I have't used hacksaw yet. However I believe you can combine filters like this just fine.

http://twig.sensiolabs.org/doc/filters/raw.html

Answer 3

I have used hacksaw on a few projects, but I haven't come across this before so I can't replicate it. The above answer may work but you could try reordering it to:

{{ entry.thing|raw|hacksaw(words='100') }}

If this doesn't work, I'll try and replicate it. Can you paste the code for us?