Python Pandas Data Frame: One column contains special HTML spcial characters such as & < Is there a way to remove them?

Question

I am only showing an example here. Is there a way to remove all of the special characters? (eg. not just "&" and "<" shown)

Answer 1

found this https://gist.github.com/codeboy/5487eeb1c551d59e2366 which does slightly more than you're asking, so i modified it to this:

import re

def parse_text(text, patterns=None): 
    """ 
    modified from above github gist
    delete all HTML entities 
    :param text (str): given text 
    :param patterns (dict): patterns for re.sub 
    :return str: final text 
    """ 
    base_patterns = {"&[rl]dquo;": "", 
                     "&[rl]squo;": "", 
                     " ": "", 
                      "&": ""} 
    patterns = patterns or base_patterns 
     
    final_text = text 
    for pattern, repl in patterns.items(): 
        final_text = re.sub(pattern, repl, final_text) 
    return final_text

you can call it like this, assigning to a new column so you can compare the result to the original string:

df["column3"] = df["column2"].apply(parse_text)

please note that the patterns variable is probably not complete, and you may have to augment it based on what you have in your escaped HTML.