CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonunicodecharacter-encodingcontent-typebeautifulsoup
KeyboardInterrupt
KeyboardInterrupt

Reputation: 3763

Decoding HTML entities with Python

I'm trying to decode HTML entries from here NYTimes.com and I cannot figure out what I am doing wrong.

Take for example: 

"U.S. Adviser’s Blunt Memo on Iraq: Time ‘to Go Home’"

I've tried BeautifulSoup, decode('iso-8859-1'), and django.utils.encoding's smart_str without any success.

Upvotes: 19

Views: 24662

Answers (4)

John Machin
John Machin

Reputation: 82924

Actually what you have are not HTML entities. There are THREE varieties of those &.....; thingies -- for example       all mean U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE.

  (the type you have) is a "numeric character reference" (decimal).
  is a "numeric character reference" (hexadecimal).
  is an entity.

Further reading: http://htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/

Here you will find code for Python2.x that does all three in one scan through the input: http://effbot.org/zone/re-sub.htm#unescape-html

Upvotes: 20

jfs
jfs

Reputation: 414079

>>> from HTMLParser import HTMLParser
>>> print HTMLParser().unescape('U.S. Adviser’s Blunt Memo on Iraq: '
...                             'Time ‘to Go Home’')
U.S. Adviser’s Blunt Memo on Iraq: Time ‘to Go Home’

The function is undocumented in Python 2. It is fixed in Python 3.4+: it is exposed as html.unescape() there.

Upvotes: 22

Evan Fosmark
Evan Fosmark

Reputation: 101651

Try this:

import re

def _callback(matches):
    id = matches.group(1)
    try:
        return unichr(int(id))
    except:
        return id

def decode_unicode_references(data):
    return re.sub("&#(\d+)(;|(?=\s))", _callback, data)

data = "U.S. Adviser’s Blunt Memo on Iraq: Time ‘to Go Home’"
print decode_unicode_references(data)

Upvotes: 6

Glenn Maynard
Glenn Maynard

Reputation: 57464

This does work:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup
s = "U.S. Adviser’s Blunt Memo on Iraq: Time ‘to Go Home’"
decoded = BeautifulStoneSoup(s, convertEntities=BeautifulStoneSoup.HTML_ENTITIES)

If you want a string instead of a Unicode object, you'll need to decode it to an encoding that supports the characters being used; ISO-8859-1 doesn't:

result = decoded.encode("UTF-8")

It's unfortunate that you need an external module for something like this; simple HTML/XML entity decoding should be in the standard library, and not require me to use a library with meaningless class names like "BeautifulStoneSoup". (Class and function names should not be "creative", they should be meaningful.)

Upvotes: 18

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