html_entity_decode php,PHP's html_entity_decode() in Python

Let's say I have a file a.txt which contains html encoded HTML, sth like this:

HTML preview

...

</script></body></html>

In PHP I can do:

$content = file_get_contents('a.txt');

$start = strpos ($content, '

') + 6;

$end = strpos ($content, '');

$html = html_entity_decode(substr($content, $start, $end-$start));

file_put_contents('b.html');

And it works perfectly. The file b.html becomes a proper HTML.

My question is: How can I do that in Python, assuming the file and encoded content is in UTF-8?

Edit: I experimented a bit with HTMLParser and BeautifulStoneSoup, but they corrupt UTF-8 encoding. I experimented with UnicodeDammit, but returning string to console or file brings an exception that chars are out of range.

Edit 2: Please answer with a code examples which work in the similar manner.

Solution 1