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copied!<p>I'm a total python noob so please bear with me. I want to have python scan a page of html and replace instances of Microsoft Word entities with something UTF-8 compatible. </p> <p>My question is, how do you do that in Python (I've Googled this but haven't found a clear answer so far)? I want to dip my toe in the Python waters so I figure something simple like this is a good place to start. It seems that I would need to:</p> <ol> <li>load text pasted from MS Word into a variable</li> <li>run some sort of replace function on the contents</li> <li>output it</li> </ol> <p>In PHP I would do it like this:</p> <pre><code>$test = $_POST['pasted_from_Word']; //for example “Going Mobile” function defangWord($string) { $search = array( (chr(0xe2) . chr(0x80) . chr(0x98)), (chr(0xe2) . chr(0x80) . chr(0x99)), (chr(0xe2) . chr(0x80) . chr(0x9c)), (chr(0xe2) . chr(0x80) . chr(0x9d)), (chr(0xe2) . chr(0x80) . chr(0x93)), (chr(0xe2) . chr(0x80) . chr(0x94)), (chr(0x2d)) ); $replace = array( "&lsquo;", "&rsquo;", "&ldquo;", "&rdquo;", "&ndash;", "&mdash;", "&ndash;" ); return str_replace($search, $replace, $string); } echo defangWord($test); </code></pre> <p>How would you do it in Python?</p> <p>EDIT: Hmmm, ok ignore my confusion about UTF-8 and entities for the moment. The input contains text pasted from MS Word. Things like curly quotes are showing up as odd symbols. Various PHP functions I used to try and fix it were not giving me the results I wanted. By viewing those odd symbols in a hex editor I saw that they corresponded to the symbols I used above (0xe2, 0x80 etc.). So I simply swapped out the oddball characters with HTML entities. So if the bit I have above already IS UTF-8, what is being pasted in from MS Word that is causing the odd symbols? </p> <p>EDIT2: So I set out to learn a bit about Python and found I don't really understand encoding. The problem I was trying to solve can be handled simply by having sonsistent encoding from end to end. If the input form is UTF-8, the database that stores the input is UTF-8 and the page that outputs it is UTF-8... pasting from Word works fine. No special functions needed. Now, about learning a little Python...</p>

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