need to selectively escape html entities (&)
You shouldn't use an XML parser to parse data that isn't XML.  Find an HTML parser instead, you'll be happier in the long run.  The standard library has a few (HTMLParser and htmllib), and BeautifulSoup is a well-loved third-party package.
I'm scraping a html page, then using xml.dom.minidom.parseString() to create a dom object.
however, the html page has a '&'.  I can use cgi.escape to convert this into &amp; but it also converts all my html <> tags into &lt;&gt; which makes parseString() unhappy.
how do i go about this?  i would rather not just hack it and straight replace the "&"s
thanks