PostgreSQL - Replace HTML Entities

Question

I have just set about the task of stripping out HTML entities from our database, as we do a lot of crawling and some of the crawlers didn\'t do this at input time :(

Answer 1

This is what it took for me to get working on Ubuntu 18.04 with PG10, and Perl didn't decode some entities like , for some reason. So I used Python3.

From the command line

sudo apt install postgresql-plpython3-10

From your SQL interface:

CREATE LANGUAGE plpython3u;

CREATE OR REPLACE  FUNCTION htmlchars(str TEXT) RETURNS TEXT AS $$
    from html.parser import HTMLParser
    h = HTMLParser() 
    if str is None:
        return str
    return h.unescape(str);
$$ LANGUAGE plpython3u;