I need to convert any html entity into its ASCII equivalent using Python. My use case is that I am cleaning up some HTML used to build emails to create plaintext emails from the HTML.
Right now, I only really know how to create unicode from these entities when I need ASCII (I think) so that the plaintext email reads correctly with things like accented characters. I think a basic example is the html entity "& aacute;" or á being encoded into ASCII.
Furthermore, I'm not even 100% sure that ASCII is what I need for a plaintext email. As you can tell, I'm completely lost on this encoding stuff.
Here is a complete implementation that also handles unicode html entities. You might find it useful.
It returns a unicode string that is not ascii, but if you want plain ascii, you can modify the replace operations so that it replaces the entities to empty string.
def convert_html_entities(s):
matches = re.findall("&#\d+;", s)
if len(matches) > 0:
hits = set(matches)
for hit in hits:
name = hit[2:-1]
try:
entnum = int(name)
s = s.replace(hit, unichr(entnum))
except ValueError:
pass
matches = re.findall("&#[xX][0-9a-fA-F]+;", s)
if len(matches) > 0:
hits = set(matches)
for hit in hits:
hex = hit[3:-1]
try:
entnum = int(hex, 16)
s = s.replace(hit, unichr(entnum))
except ValueError:
pass
matches = re.findall("&\w+;", s)
hits = set(matches)
amp = "&"
if amp in hits:
hits.remove(amp)
for hit in hits:
name = hit[1:-1]
if htmlentitydefs.name2codepoint.has_key(name):
s = s.replace(hit, unichr(htmlentitydefs.name2codepoint[name]))
s = s.replace(amp, "&")
return s
Edit: added matching for hexcodes. I've been using this for a while now, and ran into my first situation with ' which is a single quote/apostrophe.
ASCII is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange and does not include any accented letters. Your best bet is to get Unicode (as you say you can) and encode it as UTF-8 (maybe ISO-8859-1 or some weird codepage if you're dealing with seriously badly coded user-agents/clients, sigh) -- the content type header of that part together with text/plain can express what encoding you've chosen to use (I do recommend trying UTF-8 unless you have positively demonstrated it cannot work -- it's almost universally supported these days and MUCH more flexible than any ISO-8859 or "codepage" hack!).
You can use the htmlentitydefs package:
import htmlentitydefs
print htmlentitydefs.entitydefs['aacute']
Basically, entitydefs is just a dictionary, and you can see this by printing it at the python prompt:
from pprint import pprint
pprint htmlentitydefs.entitydefs
We put up a little module with agazso's function:
http://github.com/ARTFL/util/blob/master/ents.py
We find agazso's function to faster than the alternatives for ent conversion. Thanks for posting it.
Related
I've looked around and haven't found anything just yet. I'm going through emails in an inbox and checking for a specific word set. It works on most emails but some of them don't parse. I checked the broken emails using.
print (msg.Body.encode('utf8'))
and my problem messages all start with b'.
like this
b'\xe6\xa0\xbc\xe6\xb5\xb4\xe3\xb9\xac\xe6\xa0\xbc\xe6\x85\xa5\xe3\xb9\xa4\xe0\xa8\x8d\xe6\xb4\xbc\xe7\x91\xa5\xe2\x81\xa1\xe7\x91\x
I think this is forcing python to read the body as bytes but I'm not sure. Either way after the b, no matter what encoding I try I don't get anything but garbage text.
I've tried other encoding methods as well decoding before but I'm just getting a ton of attribute errrors.
import win32api
import win32com.client
import datetime
import os
import time
outlook = win32com.client.Dispatch("Outlook.Application").GetNamespace("MAPI")
dater = datetime.date.today() - datetime.timedelta(days = 1)
dater = str(dater.strftime("%m-%d-%Y"))
print (dater)
#for folders in outlook.folders:
# print(folders)
Receipt = outlook.folders[8]
print(Receipt)
Ritems = Receipt.folders["Inbox"]
Rmessage = Ritems.items
for msg in Rmessage:
if (msg.Class == 46 and msg.CreationTime.strftime("%m-%d-%Y") == dater):
print (msg.CreationTime)
print (msg.Subject)
print (msg.Body.encode('utf8'))
print ('..............................')
End result is to have the message printed out in the console, or at least give Python a way to read it so I can find the text I'm looking for in the body.
The byte literal posted in the question is valid UTF-8. First two characters are U+683C and U+6D74 from the CJK Unified Ideographs block, U+4E00 - U+9FFF.
Since you don't know the source encoding there is no way to be completely sure about it, but chances are that email body is just Han characters encoded in UTF-8 (Determine the encoding of text in Python). If you are not being able to see the UTF-8 characters correctly you should check your terminal or display character set.
That said, you should to get the fundamentals of character representation right. Randomly encoding or decoding is hardly going to solve anything. I would suggest you begin by reading Spolsky's introduction to Unicode and then move to Batchelder on Unicode in Python.
As martineau said the proper encoding I was searching for was utf16. The other messages were encoded using utf8. So a simple mail scrape turned out to be an excellent lesson in encoding as well message Classes (off topic). Thanks for the help.
all - I'm trying to perform a regex on a bunch of science data, converting certain special symbols into ASCII-friendly characters. For example, I want to replace 'µ'(UTF-8 \xc2\xb5) to the string 'micro', and '±' with '+/-'. I cooked up a python script to do this, which looks like this:
import re
def stripChars(string):
outString = (re.sub(r'\xc2\xb5+','micro', string)) #Metric 'micro (10^-6)' (Greek 'mu') letter
outString = (re.sub(r'\xc2\xb1+','+/-', outString)) #Scientific 'Plus-Minus' symbol
return outString
However, for these two specific characters, I'm getting strange results. I dug into it a bit, and it looks like I'm suffering from the bug described here, in which certain characters come out wrong because they are UTF data being interpreted as Windows-1252 (or ISO 8859-1).
I grepped the relevant data, and found that it is returning the erroneous result there as well (e.g. the 'µ' appears as 'µ') However, elsewhere in the same data set there exists datum in which the same symbol is displayed correctly. This may be due to a bug in the system which collected the data in the first place. The real weirdness is that it seems my current code only catches the incorrect version, letting the correct one pass through.
In any case, I'm really stuck on how to proceed. I need to be able to come up with a series of regex substitutions which will catch both the correct and incorrect versions of these characters, but the identifier for the correct version is failing in this case.
I must admit, I'm still fairly junior to programming, and anything more than the most basic regex is still like black magic to me. This problem seems a bit more intractable than any I've had to tackle before, and that's why I bring it to here to get some more eyes on it.
Thanks!
If your input data is encoded as UTF-8, your code should work. Here’s a
complete program that works for me. It assumes the input is UTF-8 and
simply operates on the raw bytes, not converting to or from Unicode.
Note that I removed the + from the end of each input regex; that
would accept one or more of the last character, which you probably
didn’t intend.
import re
def stripChars(s):
s = (re.sub(r'\xc2\xb5', 'micro', s)) # micro
s = (re.sub(r'\xc2\xb1', '+/-', s)) # plus-or-minus
return s
f_in = open('data')
f_out = open('output', 'w')
for line in f_in:
print(type(line))
line = stripChars(line)
f_out.write(line)
If your data is encoded some other way (see for example this
question for how to tell), this version will be more useful. You can
specify any encoding for input and output. It decodes to internal
Unicode on reading, acts on that when replacing, then encodes on
writing.
import codecs
import re
encoding_in = 'iso8859-1'
encoding_out = 'ascii'
def stripChars(s):
s = (re.sub(u'\u00B5', 'micro', s)) # micro
s = (re.sub(u'\u00B1', '+/-', s)) # plus-or-minus
return s
f_in = codecs.open('data-8859', 'r', encoding_in)
f_out = codecs.open('output', 'w', encoding_out)
for uline in f_in:
uline = stripChars(uline)
f_out.write(uline)
Note that it will raise an exception if it tries to write non-ASCII data
with an ASCII encoding. The easy way to avoid this is to just write
UTF-8, but then you may not notice uncaught characters. You can catch
the exception and do something graceful. Or you can let the program
crash and update it for the character(s) you’re missing.
Ok, as you use a Python2 version, you read the file as byte strings, and your code should successfully translate all utf-8 encoded versions of µ (U+00B5) or ± (U+00B1).
This is coherent with what you later say:
my current code only catches the incorrect version, letting the correct one pass through
This is in fact perfectly correct. Let us first look at what exactly happen for µ. µ is u'\u00b5' it is encoded in utf-8 as '\xc2\xb5' and encoded in Latin1 or cp1252 as '\xb5'. As 'Â' is U+00C2, its Latin1 or cp1252 code is 0xc2. That means that a µ character correctly encoded in utf-8 will read as µ in a Windows 1252 system. And when it looks correct, it is because it is not utf-8 encoded but Latin1 encoded.
It looks that you are trying to process a file where parts are utf-8 encoded while others are Latin1 (or cp1252) encoded. You really should try to fix that in the system that is collecting data because it can cause hard to recover trouble.
The good news is that it can be fixed here because you only want to process 2 non ASCII characters: you just have to try to decode the utf-8 version as you do, and then try in a second pass to decode the Latin1 version. Code could be (ne need for regexes here):
def stripChars(string):
outString = string.replace('\xc2\xb5','micro') #Metric 'micro (10^-6)' (Greek 'mu') letter in utf-8
outString = outString.replace('\xb5','micro') #Metric 'micro (10^-6)' (Greek 'mu') letter in Latin1
outString = outString.replace('\xc2\xb1','+/-') #Scientific 'Plus-Minus' symbol in utf-8
outString = outString.replace('\xb1','+/-') #Scientific 'Plus-Minus' symbol in Latin1
return outString
For references Latin1 AKA ISO-8859-1 encoding has the exact unicode values for all unicode character below 256. Window code page 1252 (cp1252 in Python) is a Windows variation of the Latin1 encoding where some characters normally unused in Latin1 are used for higher code characters. For example € (U+20AC) is encoded as '\80' in cp1252 while it does not exist at all in Latin1.
I am making a little Python script for mass-editing of HTML files (replacing links to images etc.). Now, the HTML files contain some Cyrillic, that means I have to encode the string UTF-8. I replace all the links in the HTML, and type tag.set(data) and BOOM, the console displays:
ValueError: All strings must be XML compatible: Unicode or ASCII, no NULL bytes or control characters.
How can I fix this? I'm pretty sure that there aren't any control characters or NULL bytes. I'm using Python 2.7.11.
value = tag.get('value').encode('utf-8')
#h = HTMLParser.HTMLParser()
#value = h.unescape(value)
urls = regex.finditer(value)
if urls is None: continue
for turl in urls:
ufile = turl.group().rsplit('/', 1)[-1]
value = value.replace(turl.group(), '/'+newsrc+'/'+ufile)
#value = cgi.escape(value, True)
value = value.replace('\0', '')
tag.set('value', value)
It's easy. You only need to remove the encode('utf-8') part. You see LXML doesn't like people messing with the character encodings of strings. Just leave it to LXML to convert text into the suitable encoding and everything will be fine. :)
Hello i am experimenting with Python and LXML, and I am stuck with the problem of extracting data from the webpage which contains windows-1250 characters like ž and ć.
tree = html.fromstring(new.text,parser=hparser)
title = tree.xpath('//strong[text()="Title"]')
opis[g] = opis[g].tail.encode('utf-8')[2:]
I get text responses containing something like this :
\xc2\x9ea
instead of characters. Then I have the problem with storing into database
So how can I accomplish this? I tried put 'windows-1250' instead utf8 without success. Can I convert this code to original characters somehow?
Try:
text = "\xc2\x9ea"
print text.decode('windows-1250').encode('utf-8')
Output:
ža
And save nice chars in your DB.
If encoding to UTF-8 results in b'\xc2\x9ea', then that means the original string was '\x9ea'. Whether lxml didn't do things correctly, or something happened on your end (perhaps a parser configuration issue), the fact is that you get the equivalent of this (Python 3.x syntax):
>>> '\x9ea'.encode('utf-8')
b'\xc2\x9ea'
How do you fix it? One error-prone way would be to encode as something other than UTF-8 that can properly handle the characters. It's error-prone because while something might work in one case, it might not in another. You could instead extract the character ordinals by mapping the character ordinals and work with the character ordinals instead:
>>> list(map((lambda n: hex(n)[2:]), map(ord, '\x9ea')))
['9e', '61']
That gets us somewhere because the bytes type has a fromhex method that can decode a string containing hexadecimal values to the equivalent byte values:
>>> bytes.fromhex(''.join(map((lambda n: hex(n)[2:]), map(ord, '\x9ea'))))
b'\x9ea'
You can use decode('cp1250') on the result of that to get ža, which I believe is the string you wanted. If you are using Python 2.x, the equivalent would be
from binascii import unhexlify
unhexlify(u''.join(map((lambda n: hex(n)[2:]), map(ord, u'\x9ea'))))
Note that this is highly destructive as it forces all characters in a Unicode string to be interpreted as bytes. For this reason, it should only be used on strings containing Unicode characters that fit in a single byte. If you had something like '\x9e\u724b\x61', that code would result in joining ['9e', '724b', '61'] as '9e724b61', and interpreting that using a single-byte character set such as CP1250 would result in something like 'žrKa'.
For that reason, more reliable code would replace ord with a function that throws an exception if 0 <= ord(ch) < 0x100 is false, but I'll leave that for you to code.
As you may know, for an email to be valid in many clients, all unicode chars must be encoded. I would like to automate this encoding in a Python script.
Obviously tags need to be excluded from conversion, otherwise the html won't work - doing this is really the complicated part - to be sure of success it is necessary to use a parsing package like lxml or beautifulsoup.
As far as I know, neither of those two packages support converting to numbered unicode entities such as & #x6F22 ; (漢)
Any help would be really invaluable, I've been banging my head against this wall all day!
I’ve had a similar problem, however it was always enough to run the following expression on the raw text, which just converts hex entities to decimal entities, which are then parsed just fine:
>>> hex_entity_pat = re.compile('&#x([^;]+);')
>>> hex_entity_fix = lambda x: hex_entity_pat.sub(lambda m: '&#%d;' % int(m.group(1), 16), x) # convert hex to dec entities
>>> BeautifulSoup(hex_entity_fix("<b>漢</b>"), convertEntities=BeautifulSoup.ALL_ENTITIES)
<b>漢</b>
I’m assuming that your emails are in HTML, not plain text. I think you are looking for this:
some_unicode_string.encode('ascii', errors='xmlcharrefreplace')
But maybe you can do this some other way. How do you generate the HTML in the first place?