diff --git a/Lib/HTMLParser.py b/Lib/HTMLParser.py
index 2cbc2ec..7cee47a 100644
--- a/Lib/HTMLParser.py
+++ b/Lib/HTMLParser.py
@@ -175,6 +175,9 @@
                     i = self.updatepos(i, k)
                     continue
                 else:
+                    if ";" in rawdata[i:]: #bail by consuming &#
+                        self.handle_data(rawdata[0:2])
+                        i = self.updatepos(i, 2)
                     break
             elif startswith('&', i):
                 match = entityref.match(rawdata, i)
diff --git a/Lib/test/test_htmlparser.py b/Lib/test/test_htmlparser.py
index 810af6c..c45cf00 100644
--- a/Lib/test/test_htmlparser.py
+++ b/Lib/test/test_htmlparser.py
@@ -313,6 +313,13 @@
                 ("starttag", "html", [("foo", u"\u20AC&aa&unsupported;")])
                 ])
 
+    def test_malformatted_charref(self):
+        self._run_check("<p>&#bad;</p>", [
+            ("starttag", "p", []),
+            ("data", "&#bad;"),
+            ("endtag", "p"),
+        ])
+
 
 def test_main():
     test_support.run_unittest(HTMLParserTestCase)