There is currently a private method inside of html.parser.HTMLParser to 
unescape HTML &...; style escapes. This would be useful to expose for 
other users who want to unescape a piece of HTML.

Additionally, many websites don't use proper unicode or iso-8859-1 
encodings and accidentally use Microsoft Code Page 1252 extensions. I 
added code to map these to their appropriate unicode values.

The unescaping logic was slightly simplified too.

This is my first Python patch submission, so please let me know if I've 
done anything wrong.

A new test case was also added for this functionality.

The plan is to add html.escape(). Adding html.unescape() wouldn't hurt.

Trying to run the test and I get:-

c:\py3k\Lib>..\PCbuild\python_d.exe test\test_htmlparser.py
  File "test\test_htmlparser.py", line 326
    escaped = u"<p>There&#146;s the C&ocirc;te</p>"
                                                  ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

It's using the old Python 2 unicode string literal syntax.

It also doesn't keep to 80 cols.

I'd also rather continue using a lazily initialized dict instead of catching a KeyError for '.

I also feel that with the changes to Unicode in py3k, the cp1252 stuff won't work as desired and should be cut.

===

Is anyone still interested in html.unescape or html.escape anyway?  Every web framework seems to have their own support routines already.  Otherwise I'd recommend close -> wontfix.

msg110657 recommends close -> wontfix.  Does anybody want this kept open or can it be closed?

I'm not sure that using an hardcoded mapping CP1252 => unicode is a good idea.

I don't think Django includes an HTML unescape. I'm not familiar with other frameworks. So I'd still find this useful to include in the stdlib.

New patch attached, tested against Python 3.2. This is my first Python patch so apologies if I've done something wrong here. Feedback appreciated!

Changes:

* fit everything to 80 cols
* just made changes to the HTMLParser.unescape function instead of providing a standalone unescape function
* fixed test case to fix string literals to work in python 3k
* left the cp1252 hacks in there since it looks like they work still, but if there's a problem with them let me know. In practice I have to this at work in order to make unescaping actual web pages work.