Question

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Replace html entities with the corresponding utf-8 characters in Python 2.6
What's the easiest way to escape HTML in Python?

There is a way to easily convert a string to a HTML string,
e.g. with chars like <, > replaced by < >
or will I have to write my own conversion routine???

Answer 1

If you’re only concerned about critical special characters like &, < and >:

>>> import cgi
>>> cgi.escape("<hello&goodbye>")
'&lt;hello&amp;goodbye&gt;'

For other non-ASCII characters:

>>> "Übeltäter".encode("ascii", "xmlcharrefreplace")
b'Übeltäter'

Of course, if necessary, you can combine the two:

>>> cgi.escape("<Übeltäter>").encode("ascii", "xmlcharrefreplace")
b'&lt;&#220;belt&#228;ter&gt;'