Escaping snippets of html code in a long string

Question

I am trying to escape HTML between ''' triple quotes ''' and ' single quotes '.

Here is my code:

import html
import re

#Replace triple backticks with escaped HTML

response = re.sub(r"'''([\s\S]*?)'''", lambda match: "'''" + html.escape(match.group(1)) + "'''", response)

#Replace single quotes with escaped HTML

response = re.sub(r"'(.*?)'", lambda match: "'" + html.escape(match.group(1)) + "'", response)

but the HTML is not escaping and ends up running the actual HTML on the screen.