Question

How do you convert HTML entities to Unicode and vice versa in Python?

Answer 1

You need to have BeautifulSoup.

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup import cgi  def HTMLEntitiesToUnicode(text):     '''Converts HTML entities to unicode.  For example '&amp;' becomes '&'.'''     text = unicode(BeautifulStoneSoup(text, convertEntities=BeautifulStoneSoup.ALL_ENTITIES))     return text  def unicodeToHTMLEntities(text):     '''Converts unicode to HTML entities.  For example '&' becomes '&amp;'.'''     text = cgi.escape(text).encode('ascii', 'xmlcharrefreplace')     return text  text = '&amp;, &reg;, &lt;, &gt;, &cent;, &pound;, &yen;, &euro;, &sect;, &copy;'  uni = HTMLEntitiesToUnicode(text) htmlent = unicodeToHTMLEntities(uni)  print uni print htmlent # &, ®, <, >, ¢, £, ¥, €, §, © # &amp;, &#174;, &lt;, &gt;, &#162;, &#163;, &#165;, &#8364;, &#167;, &#169;