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Convert XML/HTML Entities into Unicode String in Python [duplicate]

I'm doing some web scraping and sites frequently use HTML entities to represent non ascii characters. Does Python have a utility that takes a string with HTML entities and returns a unicode type?

For example:

I get back:

&#x01ce;

which represents an "ǎ" with a tone mark. In binary, this is represented as the 16 bit 01ce. I want to convert the html entity into the value u'\u01ce'

Answer*

This is a function which should help you to get it right and convert entities back to utf-8 characters.

 
 def unescape(text):
 """Removes HTML or XML character references 
 and entities from a text string.
 @param text The HTML (or XML) source text.
 @return The plain text, as a Unicode string, if necessary.
 from Fredrik Lundh
 2008年01月03日: input only unicode characters string.
 http://effbot.org/zone/re-sub.htm#unescape-html
 """
 def fixup(m):
 text = m.group(0)
 if text[:2] == "&#":
 # character reference
 try:
 if text[:3] == "&#x":
 return unichr(int(text[3:-1], 16))
 else:
 return unichr(int(text[2:-1]))
 except ValueError:
 print "Value Error"
 pass
 else:
 # named entity
 # reescape the reserved characters.
 try:
 if text[1:-1] == "amp":
 text = "&amp;amp;"
 elif text[1:-1] == "gt":
 text = "&amp;gt;"
 elif text[1:-1] == "lt":
 text = "&amp;lt;"
 else:
 print text[1:-1]
 text = unichr(htmlentitydefs.name2codepoint[text[1:-1]])
 except KeyError:
 print "keyerror"
 pass
 return text # leave as is
 return re.sub("&#?\w+;", fixup, text)

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3

Why is this answer modded down? It seems useful to me.

dariopy
– dariopy

2011年02月25日 19:47:57 +00:00
Commented Feb 25, 2011 at 19:47
1

because the person wanted the character in unicode instead of utf-8 characters. I guess :)

karlcow
– karlcow

2011年02月28日 14:41:28 +00:00
Commented Feb 28, 2011 at 14:41

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Convert XML/HTML Entities into Unicode String in Python [duplicate]

Answer*