python: convert to HTML special characters

html, python

Solution

If you're only concerned about critical special characters like `&`, `<` and `>`:

>>> import cgi
>>> cgi.escape("<hello&goodbye>")
'&lt;hello&amp;goodbye&gt;'

For other non-ASCII characters:

>>> "Übeltäter".encode("ascii", "xmlcharrefreplace")
b'Übeltäter'

Of course, if necessary, you can combine the two:

>>> cgi.escape("<Übeltäter>").encode("ascii", "xmlcharrefreplace")
b'&lt;&#220;belt&#228;ter&gt;'

Problem

Original source

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