CODEWITHSUNDEEP
python
Liondancer
Liondancer

Reputation: 16479

TypeError with urlopen()

I am a bit confused with using Request, urlopen and JSONDecoder().decode().

Currently I have:

hdr = {'User-agent' : 'anything'}  # header, User-agent header describes my web browser

I am assuming that the server uses this to determine which browsers are acceptable? Not sure

my url is:

url = 'http://wwww.reddit.com/r/aww.json'

I set a req variable

req = Request(url,hdr)  #request to access the url with header
json = urlopen(req).read()   # read json page

I tried using urlopen in terminal and I get this error:

TypeError: must be string or buffer, not dict # This has to do with me header?

data = JSONDecoder().decode(json)   # translate json data so I can parse through it with regular python functions?

I'm not really sure why I get the TypeError

Upvotes: 2

Views: 4673

Answers (1)

poke
poke

Reputation: 388313

If you look at the documentation of Request, you can see that the constructor signature is actually Request(url, data=None, headers={}, …). So the second parameter, the one after the URL, is the data you are sending with the request. But if you want to set the headers instead, you will have to specify the headers parameter.

You can do this in two different ways. Either you pass None as the data parameter:

Request(url, None, hdr)

But, well, this requires you to pass the data parameter explicitely and you have to make sure that you pass the default value to not cause any unwanted effects. So instead, you can tell Python to explicitely pass the header parameter instead, without specifying data:

Request(url, headers=hdr)

Upvotes: 4

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