Problem¶
You have a text buffer containing [[HTML]] character entities and need to render them in [[Unicode]] text, replacing each entity with a single symbol.
Solution¶
Use [[BeautifulSoup|http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/]], which can do all the dirty work for you in a one-liner:
from BeautifulSoup import *
symbols = unicode(BeautifulStoneSoup(buffer, convertEntities=BeautifulStoneSoup.HTML_ENTITIES))