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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*

Python has the [htmlentitydefs][1] module, but this doesn't include a function to unescape HTML entities.

Python developer Fredrik Lundh (author of elementtree, among other things) has such a function [on his website][2], which works with decimal, hex and named entities:

 import re, htmlentitydefs
 
 ##
 # 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.
 
 def unescape(text):
 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:
 pass
 else:
 # named entity
 try:
 text = unichr(htmlentitydefs.name2codepoint[text[1:-1]])
 except KeyError:
 pass
 return text # leave as is
 return re.sub("&#?\w+;", fixup, text)

 


 [1]: https://docs.python.org/2/library/htmllib.html#module-htmlentitydefs
 [2]: http://effbot.org/zone/re-sub.htm#unescape-html

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Absolutely. Why is not in stdlib?

smci
– smci

2012年08月13日 11:21:45 +00:00
Commented Aug 13, 2012 at 11:21
Looking at its code, it doesn't seem to work with & and such, does it?

jnns
– jnns

2013年06月14日 12:22:46 +00:00
Commented Jun 14, 2013 at 12:22
Just tested successfully for &

joel.d
– joel.d

2013年09月30日 20:50:12 +00:00
Commented Sep 30, 2013 at 20:50

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

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