to_html replacing <, > in daraframes with weird characters while converting it to html

Question

I have a pandas data frame and there is a column which contains strings like these:

    Column B
    <a href="path_to_some_filea.txt" >value_of_a</a>
    <a href="path_to_some_fileb.txt" >value_of_b</a>

I converted the above pandas dataframe to html using to_html like this:

    df.to_html(index_names=False)

The converted html code replaces the <,> in the string with weird characters. The converted html for the specific column looks like this:

    &lt;a href="path_to_some_filea.txt" &gt;value_of_a&lt;/a&gt;
    &lt;a href="path_to_some_fileb.txt" &gt;value_of_b&lt;/a&gt;

Does anyone know why this is happening and how to fix this issue ?

ztepler · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-27 13:49:42Z

5

You can set escape argument in df.to_html to False, to prevent special characters escaping:

    df.to_html(index_names=False, escape=False)

It is set to True by default and it convert the characters <, >, and & to HTML-safe sequences.

answered Jun 27, 2020 at 13:44

ztepler

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