Use Python to parse html data which contains "&"

I'm using the python library SGMLParser to parse some html. I encounter an html tag of the form

<td class="school">Texas A&amp;M</td>

I'd like to read out "Texas A开发者_JS百科&M". But when handle_data gets called, it gets called with "Texas A", and then, separately, "M" (quotes for clarity).

How do I replace the

& 

string with an & before the call, without replacing all special ampersands in the whole string (some of which I may need).

Thanks!

If you switch from the deprecated SGMLParser to a modern alternative such as LXML (which also handles HTML), this becomes trivial:

>>> etree.fromstring('''<td class="school">Texas A&amp;M</td>''').text
'Texas A&M'

SGMLParser has convert_entityref() method, but instead of deprecated SGMLParser I would recommend using lxml or Beautiful Soup which have better parser API.

Entity references like & are handled by handle_entity. Check that this method knows how to translate &. The default implementation should call handle_data('&'), but you may have accidentally overwritten it.

Also, if possible, consider using the far more advanced lxml instead.