How do I delete the unicode decimal codes from a string in python

So I have this string 1993 – Liam Payne, English singer-songwriter[17] that you can see contains the characters &# followed by a number. How can I delete them automatically from my string, like you can do with \u1321 type chars for example? I tried using .encode("ascii", "ignore") and .decode() but with no success.

Thanks in advance!

>Solution :

Python 3.4+

Use html.unescape():

import html
print(html.unescape('£682m'))

FYI html.parser.HTMLParser.unescape is deprecated, and was supposed to be removed in 3.5, although it was left in by mistake. It will be removed from the language soon.

Python 2.6-3.3

You can use HTMLParser.unescape() from the standard library:

• For Python 2.6-2.7 it’s in HTMLParser
• For Python 3 it’s in html.parser

>>> try:
...     # Python 2.6-2.7 
...     from HTMLParser import HTMLParser
... except ImportError:
...     # Python 3
...     from html.parser import HTMLParser
... 
>>> h = HTMLParser()
>>> print(h.unescape('£682m'))
£682m

You can also use the six compatibility library to simplify the import:

>>> from six.moves.html_parser import HTMLParser
>>> h = HTMLParser()
>>> print(h.unescape('£682m'))
£682m