Decoding HTML entities with Python

Question

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’         


        

Answer 1

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.)