How to convert special characters into html entities?

Question

I want to convert, in python, special characters like "%$!&@á é ©" and not only '<&">' as all the documentation and references I've found so far shows. cgi.escape doesn't solve the problem.

For example, the string "á ê ĩ &" should be converted to "á ê ĩ &".

Does anyboy know how to solve it? I'm using python 2.6.

• Konrad Rudolph: Be aware of two things: (1) names entites may cause problems, you should probably use numeric entities instead. (2) Why use entities at all? In most case, a better solution is to UTF-8-encode the document so that it can contain the letters, and not use entities.
• Quentin: wiki.python.org/moin/EscapingHtml
• Jayme Tosi Neto: I agree with you @KonradRudolph. I don't like using entities, but the system in which I'm working uses, so I have no choice. =/
• Konrad Rudolph: @Jayme No problem, sometimes you have no choice. Just wanted to make sure you were aware of this.

Answer 1

You could build your own loop using the dictionaries you can find in http://docs.python.org/library/htmllib.html#module-htmlentitydefs

The one you're looking for is htmlentitydefs.codepoint2name

• oxidworks: The link is no longer working. Use HTMLParser instead in Python 2, and the equivalent, html.parser, in Python 3.

Answer 2

I found a built in solution searching for the htmlentitydefs.codepoint2name that @Ruben Vermeersch said in his answer. The solution was found here: http://bytes.com/topic/python/answers/594350-convert-unicode-chars-html-entities

Here's the function:

def htmlescape(text):
 text = (text).decode('utf-8')
 from htmlentitydefs import codepoint2name
 d = dict((unichr(code), u'&%s;' % name) for code,name in codepoint2name.iteritems() if code!=38) # exclude "&" 
 if u"&" in text:
 text = text.replace(u"&", u"&")
 for key, value in d.iteritems():
 if key in text:
 text = text.replace(key, value)
 return text

Thank you all for helping! ;)