html = (
    '<div><!-- word style><bleep><omgz 1,000 tags><--><p>It\xc2\x92s a spicy meatball!</div>'
    )
html = re.sub('&#(\\d+);', lambda m: chr(int(m.group(1))).decode('cp1252'),
    html)
print(html)
print(type(html))
print(clean.clean_html(html))
Using python to edit html, but lxml converts nice html entities to strange encoding