If the scenario you describe is possible, it's a bug in HTML::Entities. And it's not what the OP is seeing. The OP claims he need to do too many decodings, not too few.

I don't think that I'm claiming what you think I'm claiming. :-) What I meant was that, say, 
 (or even just 
) would be interpreted (incorrectly) as 
 by two passes of decode_entities, but not by one. This gives “unexpected decoding” after the second pass, but it's not a bug in HTML::Entities.

(UPDATE: I meant what I meant, but it wasn't quite what I said. A better example is a, which becomes a after one pass of the decoder and then (incorrectly) a after another. This is very particular to the ordering I mentioned earlier (first decimal, then hexadecimal, then named entities are expanded). This is the ordering in the pure-Perl decode_entities_old in HTML::Entities; I have no idea if the XS version also behaves this way. Perhaps you thought that I was mentioning that, say, &#amp;quot; " would be incorrectly converted to "? You're right, it seems to me that that is what will happen, and that it is a bug.)

On the other hand, I couldn't, and can't, think of a way that this would give the behaviour that the OP is seeing. The kind of double-encoding you mentioned sounds far more likely—and the remedy, I think, is the same, to look at the intermediate steps along the way to see where something's going wrong. (Actually, I guess that's so generic that it's true for just about any problem.)