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Decode HTML entities in Python string?

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 BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup("<p>&pound;682m</p>")
>>> text = soup.find("p").string
>>> print text
&pound;682m

How can I decode the HTML entities in text to get "682ドルm" instead of "£682m".

Answer*

### Python 3.4+

Use [`html.unescape()`][1]:

 import html
 print(html.unescape('&pound;682m'))

FYI `html.parser.HTMLParser.unescape` is deprecated, and [was supposed to be removed in 3.5][2], although it was left in by mistake. It will be removed from the language soon.

----

### Python 2.6-3.3

You can use `HTMLParser.unescape()` from the standard library:

- For Python 2.6-2.7 it's in [`HTMLParser`][3]
- For Python 3 it's in [`html.parser`][4]

```
>>> try:
... # Python 2.6-2.7 
... from HTMLParser import HTMLParser
... except ImportError:
... # Python 3
... from html.parser import HTMLParser
... 
>>> h = HTMLParser()
>>> print(h.unescape('&pound;682m'))
£682m
```

You can also use the [`six`](https://pythonhosted.org/six/) compatibility library to simplify the import:

 >>> from six.moves.html_parser import HTMLParser
 >>> h = HTMLParser()
 >>> print(h.unescape('&pound;682m'))
 £682m


 [1]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/html.html#html.unescape
 [2]: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.5/Lib/html/parser.py#L466-L470
 [3]: https://docs.python.org/2/library/htmlparser.html
 [4]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/html.parser.html

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9

this method doesn't seem to escape characters like "’" on google app engine, though it works locally on python2.6. It does still decode entities (like ") at least

gfxmonk
– gfxmonk

2010年07月10日 14:40:38 +00:00
Commented Jul 10, 2010 at 14:40
How can an undocumented API be deprecated? Edited the answer.

Markus Unterwaditzer
– Markus Unterwaditzer

2015年06月05日 18:15:19 +00:00
Commented Jun 5, 2015 at 18:15
@MarkusUnterwaditzer there's no reason that an undocumented method can't be deprecated. This one throws deprecation warnings - see my edit to the answer.

Mark Amery
– Mark Amery

2015年11月25日 15:06:41 +00:00
Commented Nov 25, 2015 at 15:06
1

Worth noting for Python 2: Special characters are replaced with their Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) encoding counterparts. E.g., it may be necessary to h.unescape(s).encode("utf-8"). The docs: """The definition provided here contains all the entities defined by XHTML 1.0 that can be handled using simple textual substitution in the Latin-1 character set (ISO-8859-1)"""

anonymous coward
– anonymous coward

2018年09月05日 15:03:24 +00:00
Commented Sep 5, 2018 at 15:03
1

It does not work for 'Don&‌#039;t forget that &‌pi; = 3.14 &‌amp; doesn&‌#039;t equal 3.' WHY is that?

canbax
– canbax

2020年05月01日 09:15:53 +00:00
Commented May 1, 2020 at 9:15

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Decode HTML entities in Python string?

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