From escaped html -> to regular html? - Python

Question

I used BeautifulSoup to handle XML files that I have collected through a REST API.

The responses contain HTML code, but BeautifulSoup escapes all the HTML tags so it can be displayed nicely.

Unfortunately I need the HTML code.

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How would I go on about transforming the escaped HTML into proper markup?

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Help would be very much appreciated!

Answer 1

I think you want xml.sax.saxutils.unescape from the Python standard library.

E.g.:

>>> from xml.sax import saxutils as su
>>> s = '<foo>bar</foo>'
>>> su.unescape(s)
'<foo>bar</foo>'

Answer 2

You could try the urllib module?

It has a method unquote() that might suit your needs.

Edit: on second thought, (and more reading of your question) you might just want to just use string.replace()

Like so:

string.replace('&lt;','<')
string.replace('&gt;','>')