Issue
I have my sample.htm file as follows:
<html><head>
<title>hello</title>
</head>
<body>
<p> Hello! he said. !</p>
</body>
</html>
I have my python code as follows:
with open('sample.htm', 'r',encoding='utf8') as f:
contents = f.read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(contents, 'html.parser')
with open("sample-output.htm", "w", encoding='utf-8') as file:
file.write(str(soup))
This reads the sample.htm and writes to another sample-output.htm
The output of the above:
<html><head>
<title>hello</title>
</head>
<body>
<p> Hello! he said. !</p>
</body>
</html>
How can i preserve the after writing to the file.
Solution
Read and follow basic docs: Output formatters
If you give Beautiful Soup a document that contains HTML entities like
“&lquot;”, they’ll be converted to Unicode characters
…
If
you then convert the document to a string, the Unicode characters will
be encoded asUTF-8. You won’t get the HTML entities back
…
You can change this behavior by providing a value for the
formatterargument toprettify(),encode(), ordecode()
…
If you pass informatter="html", Beautiful Soup will
convert Unicode characters to HTML entities whenever possible:
soup_string = soup.prettify(formatter="html")
print( soup_string)
<html> <head> <title> hello </title> </head> <body> <p> Hello! he said. ! </p> </body> </html>
print(type(soup_string)) # for the sake of completeness
<class 'str'>
Another way (no "prettify"):
print(soup.encode(formatter="html").decode())
<html><head> <title>hello</title> </head> <body> <p> Hello! he said. !</p> </body> </html>
Answered By – JosefZ
Answer Checked By – Katrina (BugsFixing Volunteer)