Search code examples
pythonhtmlhtml-parsingbeautifulsoup

How to insert a blank space(&nbsp) into a Beautifulsoup tag?

I'm trying to add a '&nbsp' into a Beautifulsoup tag. BS converts the tag.string to \&ampamp;nbsp; instead of &nbsp. It has to be some encoding issue but I can't figure it out.

PLEASE NOTE: ignore the back '\' character. I had to add it so stackoverflow would format my question correctly.

import bs4 as Beautifulsoup

html = "<td><span></span></td>"
soup = Beautifulsoup(html)
tag = soup.find("td")
tag.string = "&nbsp;"

Current output is html = "\&amp;nbsp;"

Any ideas?

Solution

  • By default BeautifulSoup uses minimal output formatter and converts HTML entities.

    The solution is to set output formatter to None, quote from BS source (PageElement docstring):

    # There are five possible values for the "formatter" argument passed in
# to methods like encode() and prettify():
#
# "html" - All Unicode characters with corresponding HTML entities
#   are converted to those entities on output.
# "minimal" - Bare ampersands and angle brackets are converted to
#   XML entities: &amp; &lt; &gt;
# None - The null formatter. Unicode characters are never
#   converted to entities.  This is not recommended, but it's
#   faster than "minimal".

    Example:

    from bs4 import BeautifulSoup


html = "<td><span></span></td>"
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
tag = soup.find("span")
tag.string = '&nbsp;'

print soup.prettify(formatter=None)

    prints:

    <td>
 <span>
  &nbsp;
 </span>
</td>

    Hope that helps.