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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.

Python correct encoding of Website (Beautiful Soup)

I am trying to load a html-page and output the text, even though i am getting the webpage correctly, BeautifulSoup destroys somehow the encoding.
Source:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import requests
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
url = "http://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/utf8/"
r = requests.get(url)
encodedText = r.text.encode("utf-8")
soup = BeautifulSoup(encodedText)
text = str(soup.findAll(text=True))
print text.decode("utf-8")
Excerpt Output:
...Odenw\xc3\xa4lderisch...
this should be Odenwälderisch

You are making two mistakes; you are mis-handling encoding, and you are treating a result list as something that can safely be converted to a string without loss of information.
First of all, don't use response.text! It is not BeautifulSoup at fault here, you are re-encoding a Mojibake. The requests library will default to Latin-1 encoding for text/* content types when the server doesn't explicitly specify an encoding, because the HTTP standard states that that is the default.
See the Encoding section of the Advanced documentation:
The only time Requests will not do this is if no explicit charset is present in the HTTP headers and the Content-Type header contains text. In this situation, RFC 2616 specifies that the default charset must be ISO-8859-1. Requests follows the specification in this case. If you require a different encoding, you can manually set the Response.encoding property, or use the raw Response.content.
Bold emphasis mine.
Pass in the response.content raw data instead:
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.content)
I see that you are using BeautifulSoup 3. You really want to upgrade to BeautifulSoup 4 instead; version 3 has been discontinued in 2012, and contains several bugs. Install the beautifulsoup4 project, and use from bs4 import BeautifulSoup.
BeautifulSoup 4 usually does a great job of figuring out the right encoding to use when parsing, either from a HTML <meta> tag or statistical analysis of the bytes provided. If the server does provide a characterset, you can still pass this into BeautifulSoup from the response, but do test first if requests used a default:
encoding = r.encoding if 'charset' in r.headers.get('content-type', '').lower() else None
parser = 'html.parser' # or lxml or html5lib
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.content, parser, from_encoding=encoding)
Last but not least, with BeautifulSoup 4, you can extract all text from a page using soup.get_text():
text = soup.get_text()
print text
You are instead converting a result list (the return value of soup.findAll()) to a string. This never can work because containers in Python use repr() on each element in the list to produce a debugging string, and for strings that means you get escape sequences for anything not a printable ASCII character.

It's not BeautifulSoup's fault. You can see this by printing out encodedText, before you ever use BeautifulSoup: the non-ASCII characters are already gibberish.
The problem here is that you are mixing up bytes and characters. For a good overview of the difference, read one of Joel's articles, but the gist is that bytes are, well, bytes (groups of 8 bits without any further meaning attached), whereas characters are the things that make up strings of text. Encoding turns characters into bytes, and decoding turns bytes back into characters.
A look at the requests documentation shows that r.text is made of characters, not bytes. You shouldn't be encoding it. If you try to do so, you will make a byte string, and when you try to treat that as characters, bad things will happen.
There are two ways to get around this:
Use the raw undecoded bytes, which are stored in r.content, as Martijn suggested. Then you can decode them yourself to turn them into characters.
Let requests do the decoding, but just make sure it uses the right codec. Since you know that's UTF-8 in this case, you can set r.encoding = 'utf-8'. If you do this before you access r.text, then when you do access r.text, it will have been properly decoded, and you get a character string. You don't need to mess with character encodings at all.
Incidentally, Python 3 makes it somewhat easier to maintain the difference between character strings and byte strings, because it requires you to use different types of objects to represent them.

There are a couple of errors in your code:
First of all, your attempt at re-encoding the text is not needed.
Requests can give you the native encoding of the page and BeautifulSoup can take this info and do the decoding itself:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import requests
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
url = "http://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/utf8/"
r = requests.get(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.text, "html5lib")
Second of all, you have an encoding issue. You are probably trying to visualize the results on the terminal. What you will get is the unicode representation of the characters in the text for every character that is not in the ASCII set. You can check the results like this:
res = [item.encode("ascii","ignore") for item in soup.find_all(text=True)]

Wrong encoding when displaying an HTML Request in Python

I do not understand why when I make a HTTP request using the Requests library, then I ask to display the command .text, special characters (such as accents) are encoded (é = é for example).
Yet when I try r.encoding, I get utf-8.
In addition, the problem occurs only on some websites. Sometimes I have the correct characters, but other times, not at all.
Try as follows:
r = requests.get("https://gks.gs/login")
print r.text
There encoded characters which are displayed, we can see Mot de passe oublié ?.
I do not understand why. Do you think it may be because of https? How to fix this please?

These are HTML character entity references, the easiest way to decode them is:
In Python 2.x:
>>> import HTMLParser
>>> HTMLParser.HTMLParser().unescape('oublié')
'oublié'
In Python 3.x:
>>> import html.parser
>>> html.parser.HTMLParser().unescape('oublié')
'oublié'

These are HTML escape codes, defined in the HTML Coded Character Set. Even though a certain document may be encoded in UTF-8, HTML (and its grandparent, SGML) were defined back in the good old days of ASCII. A system accessing an HTML page on the WWW may or may not natively support extended characters, and the developers needed a way to define "advanced" characters for some users, while failing gracefully for other users whose systems could not support them. Since UTF-8 standardization was only a gleam in its founders' eyes at that point, an encoding system was developed to describe characters that weren't part of ASCII. It was up to the browser developers to implement a way of displaying those extended characters, either through glyphs or through extended fonts.

Encoding special characters using &sometihg; is "legal" in any HTML and despite of looking a bit strange, they are to be considered valid.
The text is supposed to be rendered by some HTML browser and it will result in correct result, regardless if you find these character encoded using given construct or directly.
For instructions how to convert these encoded characters see HTML Entity Codes to Text

Those are HTML escape codes, often referred to as HTML entities. As you see, HTML uses its own code to replace reserved symbols.
You can use the library HTMLParser
parser = HTMLParser.HTMLParser
parsed = parser.unescape(r.text)

lxml.html parsing and utf-8 with requests

i used requests to retrieve a url which contains some unicode characters, and want to do some processing with it , then write it out.
r=requests.get(url)
f=open('unicode_test_1.html','w');f.write(r.content);f.close()
html = lxml.html.fromstring(r.content)
htmlOut = lxml.html.tostring(html)
f=open('unicode_test_2.html','w');f.write(htmlOut);f.close()
in unicode_test_1.html, all chars looks fine, but in unicode_test_2.html, some chars changed to gibberish, why is that ?
i then tried
html = lxml.html.fromstring(r.text)
htmlOut = lxml.html.tostring(html,encoding='latin1')
f=open('unicode_test_2.html','w');f.write(htmlOut);f.close()
it seems it's working now. but i don't know why is this happening, always use latin1 ?
what's the difference between r.text and r.content, and why can't i write html out using encoding='utf-8' ?

You've not specified if you're using python 2 or 3. Encoding is handled quite differently depending on which version you're using. The following advice is more or less universal anyway.
The difference between r.text and r.content is in the Requests docs. Simply put Requests will attempt to figure out the character encoding for you and return Unicode after decoding it. This which is accessible via r.text. To get just the bytes use r.content.
You really need to get to grips with encodings. Read http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html and watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgHbC6udIqc to get started. Also, do a search for "Overcoming frustration: Correctly using unicode in python2" for additional help.
Just to clarify, it's not as simple as always use one encoding over another. Make a Unicode sandwich by doing any I/O in bytes and work with Unicode in your application. If you start with bytes (isinstance(mytext, str)) you need to know the encoding to decode to Unicode, if you start with Unicode (isinstance(mytext, unicode)) you should encode to UTF-8 as it will handle all the worlds characters.
Make sure your editor, files, server and database are configured to UTF-8 also otherwise you'll get more 'gibberish'.
If you want further help post the source files and output of your script.

BeautifulSoup 4 converting HTML entities to unicode, but getting junk characters when using print

I am trying to scrape text from the web using BeautifulSoup 4 to parse it out. I am running into an issue when printing bs4 processed text out to the console. Whenever I hit a character that was originally an HTML entity, like ’ I get garbage characters on the console. I believe bs4 is converting these entities to unicode correctly because if I try using another encoding to print out the text, it will complain about the appropriate lack of unicode mapping for a character (like u'\u2019.) I'm not sure why the print function gets confused over these characters. I've tried changing around fonts, which changes the garbage characters, and am on a Windows 7 machine with US-English locale. Here is my code for reference, any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance!
#!/usr/bin/python
import json
import urllib2
import cookielib
import bs4
cj = cookielib.CookieJar()
opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))
url = "http://api.nytimes.com/svc/search/v2/articlesearch.json?q=Tiguan\
&page=0&api-key=blah"
response = opener.open(url)
articles = response.read()
decoded = json.loads(articles)
totalpages = decoded['response']['meta']['hits']/10
for page in range(totalpages + 1):
if page>0:
url = "http://api.nytimes.com/svc/search/v2/articlesearch.json?\
q=Tiguan&page=" + str(page) + "&api-key=blah"
response = opener.open(url)
articles = response.read()
decoded = json.loads(articles)
for url in decoded['response']['docs']:
print url['web_url']
urlstring = url['web_url']
art = opener.open(urlstring)
soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(art.read())
goodstuff = soup.findAll('nyt_text')
for tag in goodstuff:
print tag.prettify().encode("UTF")

The problem has nothing to do with bs4, or HTML entities, or anything else. You could reproduce the exact same behavior, on most Windows systems, with a one-liner program to print out the same characters that are appearing as garbage when you try to print them, like this:
print u'\u2019'.encode('UTF-8')
The problem here is that, like the vast majority of Windows systems (and nothing else anyone uses in 2013), your default character set is not UTF-8, but something like CP1252.
So, when you encode your Unicode strings to UTF-8 and print those bytes to the console, the console interprets them as CP1252. Which, in this case, means you get ’ instead of ’.
Changing fonts won't help. The UTF-8 encoding of \u2013 is the three bytes \xe2, \x80, and \x99, and the CP1252 meaning of those three bytes is â, €, and ™.
If you want to encode manually for the console, you need to encode to the right character set, the one your console actually uses. You may be able to get that as sys.stdout.encoding.
Of course you may get an exception trying to encode things for the right character set, because 8-bit character sets like CP1252 can only handle about 240 of the 110K characters in Unicode. The only way to handle that is to use the errors argument to encode to either ignore them or replace them with replacement characters.
Meanwhile, if you haven't read the Unicode HOWTO, you really need to. Especially if you plan to stick with Python 2.x and Windows.
If you're wondering why a few command-line programs seem to be able to get around these problems: Microsoft's solution to the character set problem is to create a whole parallel set of APIs that use 16-bit characters instead of 8-bit, and those APIs always use UTF-16. Unfortunately, many things, like the portable stdio wrappers that Microsoft provides for talking to the console and that Python 2.x relies on, only have the 8-bit API. Which means the problem isn't solved at all. Python 3.x no longer uses those wrappers, and there have been recurring discussions on making some future version talk UTF-16 to the console. But even if that happens in 3.4 (which seems very unlikely), that won't help you as long as you're using 2.x.

#abarnert's answer contains a good explanation of the issue.
In your particular case, you could just pass encoding parameter to prettify() instead of default utf-8.
If you are printing to console, you could try to print Unicode directly:
print soup.prettify(encoding=None, formatter='html') # print Unicode
It may fail. If you pass ascii; then BeautifulSoup may use numerical character references instead of non-ascii characters:
print soup.prettify('ascii', formatter='html')
It assumes that current Windows codepage is ascii-based encoding (most of them do). It should also work if the output is redirected to a file or another program via a pipe.
For portability, you could always print Unicode (encoding=None above) and use PYTHONIOENCODING to get appropriate character encoding e.g., utf-8 for files, pipes and ascii:xmlcharrefreplace to avoid garbage in a console.