python reading unicode characters from html

Question

I have this script, which reads the text from web page:

page = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(page);
paragraphs = soup.findAll('p');

for p in paragraphs:
    content = content+p.text+" ";

In the web page I have this string:

Möddinghofe

My script reads it as:

M&#195;&#182;ddinghofe

How can I read it as it is?

possible duplicate of [Convert XML/HTML Entities into Unicode String in Python](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/57708/convert-xml-html-entities-into-unicode-string-in-python) — Chris B., May 14 '12 at 18:12

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:27

Hope this would help you

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup
import cgi

def HTMLEntitiesToUnicode(text):
    """Converts HTML entities to unicode.  For example '&amp;' becomes '&'."""
    text = unicode(BeautifulStoneSoup(text, convertEntities=BeautifulStoneSoup.ALL_ENTITIES))
    return text

def unicodeToHTMLEntities(text):
    """Converts unicode to HTML entities.  For example '&' becomes '&amp;'."""
    text = cgi.escape(text).encode('ascii', 'xmlcharrefreplace')
    return text

text = "&amp;, &reg;, &lt;, &gt;, &cent;, &pound;, &yen;, &euro;, &sect;, &copy;"

uni = HTMLEntitiesToUnicode(text)
htmlent = unicodeToHTMLEntities(uni)

print uni
print htmlent
# &, ®, <, >, ¢, £, ¥, €, §, ©
# &amp;, &#174;, &lt;, &gt;, &#162;, &#163;, &#165;, &#8364;, &#167;, &#169;

reference:Convert HTML entities to Unicode and vice versa

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 14 '12 at 18:25

0

I suggest you take a look at the encoding section of the BeautifulSoup documentation.

answered May 14 '12 at 18:25

twaddington

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python reading unicode characters from html

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