Convert numeric character reference notation to unicode string

Question

Is there a standard, preferably Pythonic, way to convert the &#xxxx; notation to a proper unicode string?

For example,

מפגשי

Should be converted to:

מפגשי

It can be done - quite easily - using string manipulations, but I wonder if there's a standard library for this.

Answer 1

Use HTMLParser.HTMLParser():

>>> from HTMLParser import HTMLParser
>>> h = HTMLParser()
>>> s = "מפגשי"
>>> print h.unescape(s)
מפגשי

It's part of the standard library, too.

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However, if you're using Python 3, you have to import from html.parser:

>>> from html.parser import HTMLParser
>>> h = HTMLParser()
>>> s = 'מפגשי'
>>> print(h.unescape(s))
מפגשי