Q. How does Jinja2 escape filter HTML escape? A. MarkupSafe.

test_jinja2_escape.py

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from nose.tools import eq_

import markupsafe

jinja_escape = lambda s: '%s' % markupsafe.escape(s)
# note: lambda s: str(markupsafe.escape(s)) doesn't work in some cases

scraped_string = soup.find('p', id='important').string # should be escaped by jinja2 escape filter
expect_string = jinja_escape('M & M') # => 'M & M'

eq_(scraped_string, expect_string)