I'm working with strings that contain xml escape codes, such as '0'
and need a way in python to unescape these back to their ascii
representation, such as '&' but can't seem to find a python method for
this. I tried xml.sax.saxutils.unescape(s), but while it works with
'&', it doesn't work with '0' and other numeric codes. Any
suggestions on how to decode the numeric xml escape codes such as this?
Thanks.
Maybe just a regex sub function would do it for you? Do you just need the decimal
forms like above or also the hex? If your coded entities are to ÿ or
&x00; to &xff; this might work. Other entities are converted to '?'.
If you want to do this properly, I think you have to parse the html a little and see
what the encoding is, and convert to unicode, and then do the conversions.
Very little tested!!
====< cvthtmlent.py >======================================
import re
rxo =re.compile(r'\&\#(x?[0-9a-fA-F]+);')
def ent2chr(m):
code = m.group(1)
if code.isdigit(): code = int(code)
else: code = int(code[1:], 16)
if code<256: return chr(code)
else: return '?' #XXX unichr(code).encode('utf-16le') ??
def cvthtmlent(s): return rxo.sub(ent2chr, s)
if __name__ == '__main__':
import sys; args = sys.argv[1:]
if args:
arg = args.pop(0)
if arg == '-test':
print cvthtmlent(
'blah [0] blah [ö] blah [123] ω')
else:
if arg == '-': fi = sys.stdin
else: fi = file(arg)
for line in fi:
sys.stdout.write(cvthtmlent(line))
===========================================================
If you run this in idle, you can see the umlaut, but not the omega, which becomes a '?'
Martin can tell you the real scoop ;-)
>>> from cvthtmlent import cvthtmlent as cvt
>>> print cvt('blah [0] blah [ö] blah [123] ω')
blah [0] blah [ö] blah [123] ?
Regards,
Bengt Richter
