Question

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Convert XML/HTML Entities into Unicode String in Python

I am reading an excel XML document using Python. I end up with a lot of characters such as
é

That represent various accented letters (and the like). Is there an easy way to convert these characters to utf-8?

Answer 1

If you just want to parse the HTML entity to its unicode equivalent:

>>> import HTMLParser
>>> parser = HTMLParser.HTMLParser()
>>> parser.unescape('é')
u'\xe9'
>>> print parser.unescape('é')
é

This is for Python 2.x, for 3.x the import is import html.parser