How do you htmlentities in Python - comp.lang.python

Message from discussion How do you htmlentities in Python

Matimus

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More options Jun 5 2007, 3:17 am

Newsgroups: comp.lang.python

From: Matimus <mccre...@gmail.com>

Date: Mon, 04 Jun 2007 17:17:27 -0000

Local: Tues, Jun 5 2007 3:17 am

Subject: Re: How do you htmlentities in Python

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On Jun 4, 6:31 am, "js " <ebgs...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi list.

> 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.

Matt

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