HTMLParser.HTMLParser().unescape() doesn't work

Apparently HTMLParser.unescape was a bit more primitive before Python 2.6.

Python 2.5:

>>> import HTMLParser
>>> HTMLParser.HTMLParser().unescape('©')
'©'

Python 2.6/2.7:

>>> import HTMLParser
>>> HTMLParser.HTMLParser().unescape('©')
u'\xa9'

UPDATE: Python 3.4+:

>>> import html
>>> html.unescape('©')
'©'

See the 2.5 implementation vs the 2.6 implementation / 2.7 implementation

Starting in python 3.9 using HTMLParser()unescape(<str>) will result in the error AttributeError: 'HTMLParser' object has no attribute 'unescape'

You can update it to:

import html
html.unescape(<str>)

This site lists some solutions, here's one of them:

from xml.sax.saxutils import escape, unescape

html_escape_table = {
    '"': """,
    "'": "'",
    "©": "©"
    # etc...
}
html_unescape_table = {v:k for k, v in html_escape_table.items()}

def html_unescape(text):
    return unescape(text, html_unescape_table)

Not the prettiest thing though, since you would have to list each escaped symbol manually.

EDIT:

How about this?

import htmllib

def unescape(s):
    p = htmllib.HTMLParser(None)
    p.save_bgn()
    p.feed(s)
    return p.save_end()