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> 1) the current approach of having a dict with name -> intvalue doesn't work anymore, and a name -> valuelist should be used instead;
> 2) the reverse dict for this would have to use tuples as keys, but I'm not sure how useful would that be (producing entities is not a common case, especially "unusual" ones like these).
> 3) The name -> char dict might still be useful, and can easily become a name -> str dict in order to deal with the multichar entities;
> 
> Since 1) is not backward-compatible the HTML5 entities should probably go in a separate dict.
+1 for a separate dict; -1 for a value list. The right value type is
'str'; name2codepoint ought to be deprecated (it's a left-over from
when the str type wasn't unicode in 2.x).
As for the reverse mapping: I'd add a dictionary that is reverse to
entitydefs (i.e. with str keys). That some keys then have two characters
is no real issue: applications that want to use this dictionary can
either ignore them, or follow the approach of always checking
Unicode combining characters - I'd expect that all "second" characters
are indeed combining.
OTOH, it's easy enough to create an inverted dictionary yourself
when you need it, and not every three-line function needs to be
in the standard library. It might actually be more useful to compile
the values into a regular expression which you can then use to
find out whether characters can be escaped using entity references.