Substitute special characters with html entities in Python

Question

I have a string where special characters like ' or " or & (...) can appear. How can I convert in the string

string = " Hello "XYZ" this 'is' a test & so on "

automatically every special characters with theire html entities, so that I get this:

string = " Hello "XYZ" this 'is' a test & so on "

Thanks!

Answer 1

See http://wiki.python.org/moin/EscapingHtml

Answer 2

The cgi.escape method will convert special charecters to valid html tags

 import cgi
 original_string = 'Hello "XYZ" this \'is\' a test & so on '
 escaped_string = cgi.escape(original_string, True)
 print original_string
 print escaped_string

will result in

Hello "XYZ" this 'is' a test & so on 
Hello "XYZ" this 'is' a test & so on 

The optional second paramter on cgi.escape escapes quotes. By default, they are not escaped

Answer 3

A simple string function will do it:

def escape(t):
    """HTML-escape the text in `t`."""
    return (t
        .replace("&", "&amp;").replace("<", "&lt;").replace(">", "&gt;")
        .replace("'", "&#39;").replace('"', "&quot;")
        )

Other answers in this thread have minor problems: The cgi.escape method for some reason ignores single-quotes, and you need to explicitly ask it to do double-quotes. The wiki page linked does all five, but uses the XML entity ', which isn't an HTML entity.

This code function does all five all the time, using HTML-standard entities.