>> If I'm not mistaken, in python, there's no standard library to convert
>> html entities, like & or > into their applicable characters.

>> htmlentitydefs provides maps that helps this conversion,
>> but it's not a function so you have to write your own function
>> make use of  htmlentitydefs, probably using regex or something.

>> To me this seemed odd because python is known as
>> 'Batteries Included' language.

>> So my questions are
>> 1. Why doesn't python have/need entity encoding/decoding?
>> 2. Is there any idiom to do entity encode/decode in python?

>> Thank you in advance.

>I think this is the standard idiom:

>>>> import xml.sax.saxutils as saxutils
>>>> saxutils.escape("&")
>'&'
>>>> saxutils.unescape(">")
>'>'
>>>> saxutils.unescape("A bunch of text with entities: & > <")
>'A bunch of text with entities: & > <'

>Notice there is an optional parameter (a dict) that can be used to
>define additional entities as well.