Decode HTML entities in Python string?

Question

I'm trying to work out if there is a better way to achieve the following:

from lxml import html
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup("<p>&pound;682m</p>")
text = soup.find("p").string

print text
>>> &pound;682m

print html.fromstring(text).text
>>> £682m

So I'm trying to produce the same string that lxml returns when I do the second print. I'd rather not have to resort to lxml in order to interpret these escaped characters: can anyone provide a way of doing this with something in the standard library?

[edit: I've accepted luc's answer but both are valid: I just thought that the answer that made use of the standard library was probably more useful in a generic sense]

Answer 1

You can also use the Html parser from the standard lib see http://docs.python.org/library/htmlparser.html

>>> import HTMLParser
>>> h = HTMLParser.HTMLParser()
>>> print h.unescape('£682m')
£682m

Answer 2

BeautifulSoup handles entity conversion:

>>> from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
>>> BeautifulSoup("<p>&pound;682m</p>", 
...               convertEntities=BeautifulSoup.HTML_ENTITIES)
<p>£682m</p>