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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T19:58:48+00:00

I’m parsing some HTML using Beautiful Soup, and occasionally the HTML it returns includes

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I’m parsing some HTML using Beautiful Soup, and occasionally the HTML it returns includes some special characters, such as — (long dash) and ® (register symbol).

I’m currently storing this html as a string in my db as is, and as a result when I display these variables in my templates the special characters appear as they do above. I’ve tried unescaping the characters using {{ variable|safe }} but that didn’t work.

What is the right way to store, and then display, these types of special characters in Django?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    What you’re looking for is here:
    http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/documentation.html#Entity Conversion

    You’ll want to use the convertEntities parameter and encode them as unicode.

    The final line should be something like

    decodedString=unicode(BeautifulStoneSoup(encodedString,convertEntities=BeautifulStoneSoup.HTML_ENTITIES)

    To display them again 

    "Your string with a long dash in it".encode('ascii', 'xmlcharrefreplace')
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