How to convert special characters into html entities?

Question

I want to convert, in python, special characters like "%$!&@á é ©" and not only '<&">' as all the documentation and references I've found so far shows. cgi.escape doesn't solve the problem.

For example, the string "á ê ĩ &" should be converted to "á ê ĩ &" .

Does anyboy know how to solve it? I'm using python 2.6.

Answer 1

You could build your own loop using the dictionaries you can find in http://docs.python.org/library/htmllib.html#module-htmlentitydefs

The one you're looking for is htmlentitydefs.codepoint2name

Answer 2

I found a built in solution searching for the htmlentitydefs.codepoint2name that @Ruben Vermeersch said in his answer. The solution was found here: http://bytes.com/topic/python/answers/594350-convert-unicode-chars-html-entities

Here's the function:

def htmlescape(text):
    text = (text).decode('utf-8')

    from htmlentitydefs import codepoint2name
    d = dict((unichr(code), u'&%s;' % name) for code,name in codepoint2name.iteritems() if code!=38) # exclude "&"    
    if u"&" in text:
        text = text.replace(u"&", u"&")
    for key, value in d.iteritems():
        if key in text:
            text = text.replace(key, value)
    return text

Thank you all for helping! ;)