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'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 10-12: ordinal not in range(128) [duplicate]

I need to fetch data from a URL with non-ascii characters but urllib2.urlopen refuses to open the resource and raises:
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u0131' in position 26: ordinal not in range(128)
I know the URL is not standards compliant but I have no chance to change it.
What is the way to access a resource pointed by a URL containing non-ascii characters using Python?
edit: In other words, can / how urlopen open a URL like:
http://example.org/Ñöñ-ÅŞÇİİ/

Strictly speaking URIs can't contain non-ASCII characters; what you have there is an IRI.
To convert an IRI to a plain ASCII URI:
non-ASCII characters in the hostname part of the address have to be encoded using the Punycode-based IDNA algorithm;
non-ASCII characters in the path, and most of the other parts of the address have to be encoded using UTF-8 and %-encoding, as per Ignacio's answer.
So:
import re, urlparse
def urlEncodeNonAscii(b):
return re.sub('[\x80-\xFF]', lambda c: '%%%02x' % ord(c.group(0)), b)
def iriToUri(iri):
parts= urlparse.urlparse(iri)
return urlparse.urlunparse(
part.encode('idna') if parti==1 else urlEncodeNonAscii(part.encode('utf-8'))
for parti, part in enumerate(parts)
)
>>> iriToUri(u'http://www.a\u0131b.com/a\u0131b')
'http://www.xn--ab-hpa.com/a%c4%b1b'
(Technically this still isn't quite good enough in the general case because urlparse doesn't split away any user:pass# prefix or :port suffix on the hostname. Only the hostname part should be IDNA encoded. It's easier to encode using normal urllib.quote and .encode('idna') at the time you're constructing a URL than to have to pull an IRI apart.)

In python3, use the urllib.parse.quote function on the non-ascii string:
>>> from urllib.request import urlopen
>>> from urllib.parse import quote
>>> chinese_wikipedia = 'http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:' + quote('首页')
>>> urlopen(chinese_wikipedia)

Python 3 has libraries to handle this situation. Use
urllib.parse.urlsplit to split the URL into its components, and
urllib.parse.quote to properly quote/escape the unicode characters
and urllib.parse.urlunsplit to join it back together.
>>> import urllib.parse
>>> url = 'http://example.com/unicodè'
>>> url = urllib.parse.urlsplit(url)
>>> url = list(url)
>>> url[2] = urllib.parse.quote(url[2])
>>> url = urllib.parse.urlunsplit(url)
>>> print(url)
http://example.com/unicod%C3%A8

It is more complex than the accepted #bobince's answer suggests:
netloc should be encoded using IDNA;
non-ascii URL path should be encoded to UTF-8 and then percent-escaped;
non-ascii query parameters should be encoded to the encoding of a page URL was extracted from (or to the encoding server uses), then percent-escaped.
This is how all browsers work; it is specified in https://url.spec.whatwg.org/ - see this example. A Python implementation can be found in w3lib (this is the library Scrapy is using); see w3lib.url.safe_url_string:
from w3lib.url import safe_url_string
url = safe_url_string(u'http://example.org/Ñöñ-ÅŞÇİİ/', encoding="<page encoding>")
An easy way to check if a URL escaping implementation is incorrect/incomplete is to check if it provides 'page encoding' argument or not.

Based on #darkfeline answer:
from urllib.parse import urlsplit, urlunsplit, quote
def iri2uri(iri):
"""
Convert an IRI to a URI (Python 3).
"""
uri = ''
if isinstance(iri, str):
(scheme, netloc, path, query, fragment) = urlsplit(iri)
scheme = quote(scheme)
netloc = netloc.encode('idna').decode('utf-8')
path = quote(path)
query = quote(query)
fragment = quote(fragment)
uri = urlunsplit((scheme, netloc, path, query, fragment))
return uri

For those not depending strictly on urllib, one practical alternative is requests, which handles IRIs "out of the box".
For example, with http://bücher.ch:
>>> import requests
>>> r = requests.get(u'http://b\u00DCcher.ch')
>>> r.status_code
200

Encode the unicode to UTF-8, then URL-encode.

Use iri2uri method of httplib2. It makes the same thing as by bobin (is he/she the author of that?)

Another option to convert an IRI to an ASCII URI is to use furl package:
gruns/furl: 🌐 URL parsing and manipulation made easy. - https://github.com/gruns/furl
Python's standard urllib and urlparse modules provide a number of URL
related functions, but using these functions to perform common URL
operations proves tedious. Furl makes parsing and manipulating URLs
easy.
Examples
Non-ASCII domain
http://国立極地研究所.jp/english/ (Japanese National Institute of Polar Research website)
import furl
url = 'http://国立極地研究所.jp/english/'
furl.furl(url).tostr()
'http://xn--vcsoey76a2hh0vtuid5qa.jp/english/'
Non-ASCII path
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/日本語 ("Japanese" article in Wikipedia)
import furl
url = 'https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/日本語'
furl.furl(url).tostr()
'https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%AA%9E'

works! finally
I could not avoid from this strange characters, but at the end I come through it.
import urllib.request
import os
url = "http://www.fourtourismblog.it/le-nuove-tendenze-del-marketing-tenere-docchio/"
with urllib.request.urlopen(url) as file:
html = file.read()
with open("marketingturismo.html", "w", encoding='utf-8') as file:
file.write(str(html.decode('utf-8')))
os.system("marketingturismo.html")

Weird json value urllib python

I'm trying to manipulate a dynamic JSON from this site:
http://esaj.tjsc.jus.br/cposgtj/imagemCaptcha.do
It has 3 elements, imagem, a base64, labelValorCaptcha, just a message, and uuidCaptcha, a value to pass by parameter to play a sound in this link bellow:
http://esaj.tjsc.jus.br/cposgtj/somCaptcha.do?timestamp=1455996420264&uuidCaptcha=sajcaptcha_e7b072e1fce5493cbdc46c9e4738ab8a
When I enter in the first site through a browser and put in the second link the uuidCaptha after the equal ("..uuidCaptcha="), the sound plays normally. I wrote a simple code to catch this elements.
import urllib, json
url = "http://esaj.tjsc.jus.br/cposgtj/imagemCaptcha.do"
response = urllib.urlopen(url)
data = json.loads(response.read())
urlSound = "http://esaj.tjsc.jus.br/cposgtj/somCaptcha.do?timestamp=1455996420264&uuidCaptcha="
print urlSound + data['uuidCaptcha']
But I dont know what's happening, the caught value of the uuidCaptcha doesn't work. Open a error web page.
Someone knows?
Thanks!

It works for me.
$ cat a.py
#!/usr/bin/env python
# encoding: utf-8
import urllib, json
url = "http://esaj.tjsc.jus.br/cposgtj/imagemCaptcha.do"
response = urllib.urlopen(url)
data = json.loads(response.read())
urlSound = "http://esaj.tjsc.jus.br/cposgtj/somCaptcha.do?timestamp=1455996420264&uuidCaptcha="
print urlSound + data['uuidCaptcha']
$ python a.py
http://esaj.tjsc.jus.br/cposgtj/somCaptcha.do?timestamp=1455996420264&uuidCaptcha=sajcaptcha_efc8d4bc3bdb428eab8370c4e04ab42c

As I said #Charlie Harding, the best way is download the page and get the JSON values, because this JSON is dynamic and need an opened web link to exist.
More info here.

Strange Output from Python urllib2

I would like to read to source code of a webpage using urllib2; however, I'm seeing a strange output that I've not seen before. Here's the code (Python 2.7, Linux):
import urllib2
open_url = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.elegantthemes.com/gallery/")
site_html = open_url.read()
site_html[50:]
Which gives the output:
'\x1f\x8b\x08\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x03\xe5\\ms\xdb\xb6\xb2\xfel\xcf\xe4?\xc0<S[\x9a\x8a\xa4^\xe28u,\xa5\x8e\x93\xf4\xa4\x93&\x99:9\xbdw\x9a\x8e\x07"'
Does anyone know why it's showing this as the output and not the correct HTML?

The http response being sent by the site is actually gzipped content and hence the strange output. urllib does not automatically decode the gzip cntent. There are two ways to solve this -
1) Decode zipped content before printing -
import urllib2
import io
import gzip
open_url = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.elegantthemes.com/gallery/")
site_html = open_url.read()
bi = io.BytesIO(site_html)
gf = gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=bi, mode="rb")
s = gf.read()
print s[50:]
2) Use Requests library -
import requests
r = requests.get('http://www.elegantthemes.com/gallery/')
print r.content

Python Requests URL with Unicode Parameters

I'm currently trying to hit the google tts url, http://translate.google.com/translate_tts with japanese characters and phrases in python using the requests library.
Here is an example:
http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=ja&q=ひとつ
However, when I try to use the python requests library to download the mp3 that the endpoint returns, the resulting mp3 is blank. I have verified that I can hit this URL in requests using non-unicode characters (via romanji) and have gotten correct responses back.
Here is a part of the code I am using to make the request
langs = {'japanese': 'ja',
'english': 'en'}
def get_sound_file_for_text(text, download=False, lang='japanese'):
r = StringIO()
glang = langs[lang]
text = text.replace('*', '')
text = text.replace('/', '')
text = text.replace('x', '')
url = 'http://translate.google.com/translate_tts'
if download:
result = requests.get(url, params={'tl': glang, 'q': text})
r.write(result.content)
r.seek(0)
return r
else:
return url
Also, if I print textor url within this snippet, the kana/kanji is rendered correctly in my console.
Edit:
If I attempt to encode the unicode and quote it as such, I still get the same response.
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from StringIO import StringIO
import urllib
import requests
__author__ = 'jacob'
langs = {'japanese': 'ja',
'english': 'en'}
def get_sound_file_for_text(text, download=False, lang='japanese'):
r = StringIO()
glang = langs[lang]
text = text.replace('*', '')
text = text.replace('/', '')
text = text.replace('x', '')
text = urllib.quote(text.encode('utf-8'))
url = 'http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=%(glang)s&q=%(text)s' % locals()
print url
if download:
result = requests.get(url)
r.write(result.content)
r.seek(0)
return r
else:
return url
Which returns this:
http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=ja&q=%E3%81%B2%E3%81%A8%E3%81%A4
Which seems like it should work, but doesn't.
Edit 2:
If I attempt to use urlllb/urllib2, I get a 403 error.
Edit 3:
So, it seems that this problem/behavior is simply limited to this endpoint. If I try the following URL, a different endpoint.
http://www.kanjidamage.com/kanji/13-un-%E4%B8%8D
From within requests and my browser, I get the same response (they match). If I even try ascii characters to the server, like this url.
http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=ja&q=sayonara
I get the same response as well (they match again). But if I attempt to send unicode characters to this URL, I get a correct audio file on my browser, but not from requests, which sends an audio file, but with no sound.
http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=ja&q=%E3%81%B2%E3%81%A8%E3%81%A4
So, it seems like this behavior is limited to the Google TTL URL?

The user agent can be part of the problem, however, it is not in this case. The translate_tts service rejects (with HTTP 403) some user agents, e.g. any that begin with Python, curl, wget, and possibly others. That is why you are seeing a HTTP 403 response when using urllib2.urlopen() - it sets the user agent to Python-urllib/2.7 (the version might vary).
You found that setting the user agent to Mozilla/5.0 fixed the problem, but that might work because the API might assume a particular encoding based on the user agent.
What you actually should do is to explicitly specify the URL character encoding with the ie field. Your URL request should look like this:
http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&tl=ja&q=%E3%81%B2%E3%81%A8%E3%81%A4
Note the ie=UTF-8 which explicitly sets the URL character encoding. The spec does state that UTF-8 is the default, but doesn't seem entirely true, so you should always set ie in your requests.
The API supports kanji, hiragana, and katakana (possibly others?). These URLs all produce "nihongo", although the audio produced for hiragana input has a slightly different inflection to the others.
import requests
one = u'\u3072\u3068\u3064'
kanji = u'\u65e5\u672c\u8a9e'
hiragana = u'\u306b\u307b\u3093\u3054'
katakana = u'\u30cb\u30db\u30f3\u30b4'
url = 'http://translate.google.com/translate_tts'
for text in one, kanji, hiragana, katakana:
r = requests.get(url, params={'ie': 'UTF-8', 'tl': 'ja', 'q': text})
print u"{} -> {}".format(text, r.url)
open(u'/tmp/{}.mp3'.format(text), 'wb').write(r.content)

I made this little method before to help me with UTF-8 encoding. I was having issues printing cyrllic and CJK languages to csvs and this did the trick.
def assist(unicode_string):
utf8 = unicode_string.encode('utf-8')
read = utf8.decode('string_escape')
return read ## UTF-8 encoded string
Also, make sure you have these two lines at the beginning of your .py.
#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
The first line is just a good python habit, it specifies which compiler to use on the .py (really only useful if you have more than one version of python loaded on your machine). The second line specifies the encoding of the python file. A slightly longer answer for this is given here.

Setting the User-Agent to Mozilla/5.0 fixes this issue.
from StringIO import StringIO
import urllib
import requests
__author__ = 'jacob'
langs = {'japanese': 'ja',
'english': 'en'}
def get_sound_file_for_text(text, download=False, lang='japanese'):
r = StringIO()
glang = langs[lang]
text = text.replace('*', '')
text = text.replace('/', '')
text = text.replace('x', '')
url = 'http://translate.google.com/translate_tts'
if download:
result = requests.get(url, params={'tl': glang, 'q': text}, headers={'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'})
r.write(result.content)
r.seek(0)
return r
else:
return url

Encoding/decoding works in browser, but not in terminal

Here's my code:
import urllib
print urllib.urlopen('http://www.indianexpress.com/news/heart-of-the-deal/811626/').read().decode('iso-8859-1')
When I view the page in Firefox, the text is displayed correctly. However, on the terminal, I see issues with character encoding.
Here are some malformed output examples:
long-term in
Indias
no-go areas
How can I fix this?

Try this (ignore unknown chars)
import urllib
url = 'http://www.indianexpress.com/news/heart-of-the-deal/811626/'
print urllib.urlopen(url).read().decode('iso-8859-1').encode('ascii','ignore')

You need to use the actual charset sent by the server instead of always assuming it's ISO 8859-1. Using a capable HTML parser such as Beautiful Soup can help.

The web-page lies; it is encoded in cp1252 aka windows-1252, NOT in ISO-8859-1.
>>> import urllib
>>> guff = urllib.urlopen('http://www.indianexpress.com/news/heart-of-the-deal/811626/').read()
>>> uguff = guff.decode('latin1')
>>> baddies = set(c for c in uguff if u'\x80' <= c < u'\xa0')
>>> baddies
set([u'\x93', u'\x92', u'\x94', u'\x97'])