HTML Entity Codes to Text

Question

Does anyone know an easy way in Python to convert a string with HTML entity codes (e.g. < &) to a normal string (e.g. < &)?

cgi.escape() will escape strings (poorly), but there is no unescape().

Answer 1

There is nothing built into the Python stdlib to unescape HTML, but there's a short script you can tailor to your needs at http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/04/unescape-html-entities-python.html.

Answer 2

HTMLParser has the functionality in the standard library. It is, unfortunately, undocumented:

>>> import HTMLParser
>>> h= HTMLParser.HTMLParser()
>>> h.unescape('alpha < β')
u'alpha < \u03b2'

htmlentitydefs is documented, but requires you to do a lot of the work yourself.

If you only need the XML predefined entities (lt, gt, amp, quot, apos), you could use minidom to parse them. If you only need the predefined entities and no numeric character references, you could even just use a plain old string replace for speed.

Answer 3

Use htmlentitydefs module. This my old code, it worked, but I'm sure there is cleaner and more pythonic way to do it:

e2c = dict(('&%s;'%k,eval("u'\\u%04x'"%v)) for k, v in htmlentitydefs.name2codepoint.items())

Answer 4

I forgot to tag it at first, but I'm using BeautifulSoup.

Digging around in the documentation, I found:

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, convertEntities=BeautifulSoup.HTML_ENTITIES)

does it exactly as I was hoping.