The htmlentitydefs Module
The htmlentitydefs
module contains a dictionary with many ISO Latin-1 character
entities used by HTML. Its use is demonstrated in Example 5-10.
Example 5-10. Using the htmlentitydefs Module
File: htmlentitydefs-example-1.py import htmlentitydefs entities = htmlentitydefs.entitydefs for entity in "amp", "quot", "copy", "yen": print entity, "=", entities[entity]amp = &
quot = "
copy = \302\251
yen = \302\245
Example 5-11 shows how to combine regular expressions with
this dictionary to translate entities in a string (the opposite of
cgi.escape
).
Example 5-11. Using the htmlentitydefs Module to Translate Entities
File: htmlentitydefs-example-2.py import htmlentitydefs import re import cgi pattern = re.compile("&(\w+?);") def descape_entity(m, defs=htmlentitydefs.entitydefs): # callback: translate one entity to its ISO Latin value try: return defs[m.group(1)] except KeyError: return m.group(0) # use as is def descape(string): return pattern.sub(descape_entity, string) print descape("<spam&eggs>") print descape(cgi.escape("<spam&eggs>"))<spam&eggs>
<spam&eggs>
Finally, Example 5-12 shows how to use translate reserved XML
characters and ISO Latin-1 characters to an XML string. This is
similar to cgi.escape
, but it also replaces
non-ASCII characters.
Example 5-12. Escaping ISO Latin-1 Entities
File: htmlentitydefs-example-3.py import htmlentitydefs import re, string # this pattern matches substrings of reserved and non-ASCII characters pattern = re.compile(r"[&<>\"\x80-\xff]+") ...
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