HTML Entity Codes to Text [duplicate]

Answer 1

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

(Python2 Docs)

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

(Python 3 Docs)

>>> import html.parser
>>> h = html.parser.HTMLParser()
>>> h.unescape('alpha < β')
'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 2

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 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.