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

This probably isnt relevant here. But to eliminate these html entites from an entire document, you can do something like this: (Assume document = page and please forgive the sloppy code, but if you have ideas as to how to make it better, Im all ears - Im new to this).

import re
import HTMLParser

regexp = "&.+?;" 
list_of_html = re.findall(regexp, page) #finds all html entites in page
for e in list_of_html:
    h = HTMLParser.HTMLParser()
    unescaped = h.unescape(e) #finds the unescaped value of the html entity
    page = page.replace(e, unescaped) #replaces html entity with unescaped value