print u'<'

How can I print <

print '>' 

How can I print >

You should use HTMLParser module to decode html:

>>> import HTMLParser
>>> h= HTMLParser.HTMLParser()
>>> h.unescape('alpha < β')
u'alpha < \u03b2'

To escape HTML, cgi module is fine:

>>> cgi.escape(u'<a>bá</a>').encode('ascii', 'xmlcharrefreplace')
'&lt;a&gt;b&#225;&lt;/a&gt;