Python 2.7, Requests library, can't get unicode - python

Documentation for Request library says that requests.get() method returns unicode always. But when I try to know what an encoding was returned, I see "windows-1251". That's a problem. When I try to get requests.get(url).text, there's an error, because current url's content has a Cyrillic symbols.
import requests
url = 'https://www.weblancer.net/jobs/'
r = requests.get(url)
print r.encoding
print r.text
I got something like that:
windows-1251
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 256-263: ordinal not in range(128)
Is it a problem of Python 2.7 or there is not a problem at all ?
Help me

From the docs:
Requests will automatically decode content from the server. Most
unicode charsets are seamlessly decoded.
When you make a request, Requests makes educated guesses about the
encoding of the response based on the HTTP headers.
requests.get().encoding is telling you the encoding that was used to convert the bitstream from the server into the Unicode text that is in the response.
In your case it is correct: the headers in the response say that the character set is windows-1251
The error you are having is after that. The python you are using is trying to encode the Unicode into ascii to print it, and failing.
You can say print r.text.encode(r.encoding) ... which is the same result as Padraic's suggestion in comments - that is r.content.
Note:
requests.get().encoding is an lvar: you can set it to what you want, if it guessed wrongly.

Related

Python - decode ('utf-8') issue

I am very new to Python.Please help me fix this issue.
I am trying to get the revenue from the link below :
https://www.google.co.in/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=kFFsWYyPEqvM8AeF7Y2IDQ&gws_rd=ssl#q=adp+revenue&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAOPgE-LUz9U3MMkozijTUskot9JPzs_JSU0uyczP088vSk_My6xKBHGKrYpSy1LzSlMBIRiSrDMAAAA&spf=1500270991898
I am using below commands :
import re
import urllib.request
data=urllib.request.urlopen(url).read()
data1=data.decode("utf-8")
Issue :
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xa0 in position
10798: invalid start byte
Maybe better with requests:
import requests
url = "https://www.google.co.in/?gfe_r...."
req = requests.get(url)
req.encoding = "utf-8"
data = req.text
The result of downloading the specific URL given in the question, is HTML code. I was able to use BeautifulSoup to scrape the page after using the following Python code to get the data:
import requests
url = "https://www.google.co.in/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=kFFsWYyPEqvM8AeF7Y2IDQ&gws_rd=ssl#q=adp+revenue&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAOPgE-LUz9U3MMkozijTUskot9JPzs_JSU0uyczP088vSk_My6xKBHGKrYpSy1LzSlMBIRiSrDMAAAA&spf=1500270991898"
response = requests.get(url)
data = response.content.decode('utf-8', errors="replace")
print (data)
Please note that I used Python3 in my code example. The syntax for print() may vary a little.
0xa0 or in unicode notation U+00A0 is the character NO-BREAK SPACE. In UTF8 it is represented as b'\xc2\xa0'. If you find it as a raw byte it probably means that your input is not UTF8 encoded but Latin1 encoded.
A quick look on the linked page shows that it is indeed latin1 encoded - but I got a french version...
The rule when you are not sure of the exact convertion is to use the replace errors processing:
data1=data.decode("utf-8", errors="replace")
then, all offending characters are replaced with the REPLACEMENT CHARACTER (U+FFFD) (displayed as �). If only few are found, that means the page contains erroneous characters, but if almost all non-ascii characters are replaced, then it means that the encoding is not UTF8. If is commonly Latin1 for west european languages, but your mileage may vary for other languages.

Fetching URL and converting to UTF-8 Python

I would like to do my first project in python but I have problem with coding. When I fetch data it shows coded letters instead of my native letters, for example '\xc4\x87' instead of 'ć'. The code is below:
import urllib.request
import sys
page = urllib.request.urlopen("http://olx.pl/")
test = page.read()
print(test)
print(sys.stdin.encoding)
z = "ł"
print(z)
print(z.encode("utf-8"))
I know that code here is poor but I tried many options to change encoding. I wrote z = "ł" to check if it can print any 'special' letter and it shows. I tried to encode it and it works also as it should. Sys.stdin.encoding shows cp852.
The data you read from a urlopen() response is encoded data. You'd need to first decode that data using the right encoding.
You appear to have downloaded UTF-8 data; you'd have to decode that data first before you had text:
test = page.read().decode('utf8')
However, it is up to the server to tell you what data was received. Check for a characterset in the headers:
encoding = page.info().getparam('charset')
This can still be None; many data formats include the encoding as part of the format. XML for example is UTF-8 by default but the XML declaration at the start can contain information about what codec was used for that document. An XML parser would extract that information to ensure you get properly decoded Unicode text when parsing.
You may not be able to print that data; the 852 codepage can only handle 256 different codepoints, while the Unicode standard is far larger.
The urlopen is returning to you a bytes object. That means it's a raw, encoded stream of bytes. Python 3 prints that in a repr format, which uses escape codes for non-ASCII characters. To get the canonical unicode you would have to decode it. The right way to do that would be to inspect the header and look for the encoding declaration. But for this we can assume UTF-8 and you can simply decode it as such, not encode it.
import urllib.request
import sys
page = urllib.request.urlopen("http://olx.pl/")
test = page.read()
print(test.decode("utf-8")) # <- note change
Now, Python 3 defaults to UTF-8 source encoding. So you can embed non-ASCII like this if your editor supports unicode and saving as UTF-8.
z = "ł"
print(z)
Printing it will only work if your terminal supports UTF-8 encoding. On Linux and OSX they do, so this is not a problem there.
The others are correct, but I'd like to offer a simpler solution. Use requests. It's 3rd party, so you'll need to install it via pip:
pip install requests
But it's a lot simpler to use than the urllib libraries. For your particular case, it handles the decoding for you out of the box:
import requests
r = requests.get("http://olx.pl/")
print(r.encoding)
# UTF-8
print(type(r.text))
# <class 'str'>
print(r.text)
# The HTML
Breakdown:
get sends an HTTP GET request to the server and returns the respose.
We print the encoding requests thinks the text is in. It chooses this based on the response header Martijin mentions.
We show that r.text is already a decoded text type (unicode in Python 2 and str in Python 3)
Then we actually print the response.
Note that we don't have to print the encoding or type; I've just done so for diagnostic purposes to show what requests is doing. requests is designed to simplify a lot of other details of working with HTTP requests, and it does a good job of it.

How to remove Byte Order Mark in python

This question is related to a recent change to the Stack Overflow API that I reported here. In that question, I received a response that seems like it'd work, but in practice I'm unable to make it work.
This is my code
import requests
import json
url="https://api.stackexchange.com/2.2/sites/?filter=%21%2AL1%2AAY-85YllAr2%29&pagesize=1&page=1"
response = requests.get(url)
response.text
This outputs
u'\ufeff{"items":[{"site_state":"normal","api_site_parameter":"stackoverflow","name":"Stack Overflow"}],"has_more":true,"quota_max":300,"quota_remaining":294}'
The leading u'\ufeff means that if I do response.json() I get a ValueError: No JSON object could be decoded
The suggestion I was provided was to use decode('utf-8-sig'). However, I can't seem to get this work work either:
Try 1:
response.text.decode('utf-8-sig')
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\ufeff' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
Try 2:
json.loads(response.text).decode('utf-8-sig')
ValueError: No JSON object could be decoded
What is the appropriate way to remove the leading u'\ufeff?
response.text is a Unicode object, i. e. it already has been decoded, so you can't decode it again.
What you need to do is tell the response object which encoding it should use:
response = requests.get(url)
response.encoding = "utf-8-sig"
respose.text
See the docs for more background info.

Decoding error with my Python function

I am using the Robot framework to automate some HTTP POST related tests. I wrote a custom Python library that has a function to do a HTTP POST. It looks like this:
# This function will do a http post and return the json response
def Http_Post_using_python(json_dict,url):
post_data = json_dict.encode('utf-8')
headers = {}
headers['Content-Type'] = 'application/json'
h = httplib2.Http()
resp, content = h.request(url,'POST',post_data,headers)
return resp, content
This works fine as long as I am not using any Unicode characters. When I have Unicode characters in the json_dict variable (for example, 메시지), it fails with this error:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xeb in position 164: ordinal not in range(128)
I am running Python 2.7.3 on Windows 7. I saw several related questions, but I have not been able to resolve the issue. I am new to Python and programming, so any help is appreciated.
Thanks.
You're getting this error because json_dict is a str, not a unicode. Without knowing anything else about the application, a simple solution would be:
if isinstance(json_dict, unicode):
json_dict = json_dict.encode("utf-8")
post_data = json_dict
However, if you're using json.dumps(…) to create the json_dict, then you don't need to encode it – that will be done by json.dumps(…).
Use requests:
requests.post(url, data=data, headers=headers)
It will deal with the encodings for you.
You're getting an error because of Python 2's automatic encoding/decoding, which is basically a bug and was fixed in Python 3. In brief, Python 2's str objects are really "bytes", and the right way to handle string data is in a unicode object. Since unicodes were introduced later, Python 2 will automatically try to convert between them and strings when you get them confused. To do so it needs to know an encoding; since you don't specify one, it defaults to ascii which doesn't have the characters needed.
Why is Python automatically trying to decode for you? Because you're calling .encode() on a str object. It's already encoded, so Python first tries to decode it for you, and guesses the ascii encoding.
You should read The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!).
Try this:
#coding=utf-8
test = "메시지"
test.decode('utf8')
In the line #coding=utf-8 i just set the file encoding to UTF-8 (to be able to write "메시지").
You need to decode the string into utf-8. decode method documentation

Download html without Python unicode errors

I am trying to download page_source to a file. However, every time I get a:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 (or something else) in
position 8304: ordinal not in range(128)
I've tried using value.encode('utf-8'), but it seems every time it throws the same exception (in addition to manually trying to replace every non-ascii character). Is there a way to 'pre-process' the html to put it into a 'write-able' format?
There are third party libraries such as BeautifulSoup and lxml that can deal with encoding issues automatically. But here's a crude example using just urlllib2:
First download some webpage containing non-ascii characters:
>>> import urllib2
>>> response = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~richard/unicode-sample.html')
>>> data = response.read()
Now have a look for the "charset" at the top of the page:
>>> data[:200]
'<html>\n<head>\n<title>Unicode 2.0 test page</title>\n<meta
content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-type"/>\n
</head>\n<body>\n<p>This page contains characters from each of the
Unicode\ncharact'
If there was no obvious charset, "UTF-8" is usually a good guess, anyway.
Finally, convert the webpage to unicode text:
>>> text = data.decode('utf-8')
I am not sure, however http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/ has a function .prettify() that returns well formatted HTML. You could try using that for "preprocessing".
The problem is probably that you're trying to go str -> utf-8, when you need to go str -> unicode -> utf-8. In other words, try unicode(s, 'utf-8').encode('utf-8').
See http://farmdev.com/talks/unicode/ for more info.

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