[SimonGreenhill]

Evening all,

Does anyone know of some way of decomposing html entities (eg &#62 to text (utf8/latin-1 whatever)?

I can't see anything in the manuals I have and a google didn't turn up anything useful.

Or will I have to write a string replace system?

--Simon

[netytan]

A while back when I first worked with HTML entities from Python (for my Net module – below) I wrote several functions for converting special characters to entities, however I've never needed a function to convert them back again .

For anyone who's interested: http://forums.devshed.com/t129666/s.html&highlight=net+module

But now I have the excuse, heres a simple function that should do what you want. It lacks any error checking but should work will all valid [numeric] entities.

def convert(entity):
    return chr(int(entity[2:-1]))

Here's the same thing as a list comprehension in the Python shell, just to show the conversion in action:

>>> entities = ('>', '&', '<')
>>> [chr(int(entity[2:-1])) for entity in entities]
['>', '&', '<']
>>>

As you can see it's surprisingly easy! And converting back again isn't much more difficult once you know how it all works .

Hope this helps,

Mark.

[SimonGreenhill]

Mental Note: search devshed before asking

Thanks Mark - this looks excellent.

-Simon