Invalid html is parsed correctly but left broken on output?

[Nick Welch]

I was assuming that this assertion would pass:

html = '<h4>foo & bar</h4>'
assert BS.BeautifulSoup(html).renderContents() == '<h4>foo &amp; bar</
h4>'

But it doesn't! I just get the original stray '&' in the output. And
actually, the
same happens with respect to '<'. BeautifulSoup is smart enough to
not be
tricked by these when building its tree, but then it gladly serializes
them back
out as invalid html.

How do I get more sane/safe output from BeautifulSoup?

[Aaron DeVore]

The function you want is prettify(), not renderContents().
renderContents does just what it sounds like; it renders the
*children* of the tag. In this case, that's "foo &amp; bar".

Cheers!
Aaron DeVore

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[Nick Welch]

I thought prettify just modified the whitespace to make the output
more human readable, and a short test supports that notion:

>>> html = BS.BeautifulSoup('<h4>foo & bar</h4>')
>>> html.renderContents()

'<h4>foo & bar</h4>'

>>> html.prettify()
'<h4>\n foo & bar\n</h4>'

What I want the output to be is:

'<h4>foo &amp; bar</h4>'