Decode HTML entities in Python string?

Question

I\'m parsing some HTML with Beautiful Soup 3, but it contains HTML entities which Beautiful Soup 3 doesn\'t automatically decode for me:

>>> from Be         


        

Answer 1

Beautiful Soup handles entity conversion. In Beautiful Soup 3, you'll need to specify the convertEntities argument to the BeautifulSoup constructor (see the 'Entity Conversion' section of the archived docs). In Beautiful Soup 4, entities get decoded automatically.

Beautiful Soup 3

>>> from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
>>> BeautifulSoup("
£682m
", 
...               convertEntities=BeautifulSoup.HTML_ENTITIES)
£682m

Beautiful Soup 4

>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> BeautifulSoup("
£682m
")
£682m