Decode HTML entities in Python string?

Question

I\'m parsing some HTML with Beautiful Soup 3, but it contains HTML entities which Beautiful Soup 3 doesn\'t automatically decode for me:

>>> from Be         


        

Answer 1

Beautiful Soup 4 allows you to set a formatter to your output

If you pass in formatter=None, Beautiful Soup will not modify strings at all on output. This is the fastest option, but it may lead to Beautiful Soup generating invalid HTML/XML, as in these examples:

print(soup.prettify(formatter=None))
# 
#  
#   

#    Il a dit <>
#   
#  
# 

link_soup = BeautifulSoup('A link')
print(link_soup.a.encode(formatter=None))
# A link