CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonpython-2.7python-3.x
Marki
Marki

Reputation: 13

Printing HTML data with Python 3

I am new to Python. I am doing a course in Python 2.7, but at the same time, I want to be able to do everything in Python 3.

Code in Python 2.7:

import socket

mysock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
mysock.connect(('www.py4inf.com', 80))
mysock.send('GET http://www.py4inf.com/code/romeo.txt HTTP/1.0\n\n')

while True:
    data = mysock.recv(512)
    if ( len(data) < 1 ) :
        break
    print data

mysock.close()

Yields properly formatted data, like so:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

Code in Python 3:

import socket

mysock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
mysock.connect(('www.py4inf.com', 80))
mysock.send(('GET http://www.py4inf.com/code/romeo.txt HTTP/1.0\n\n').encode())

while True:
    data = mysock.recv(512)
    if ( len(data) < 1 ) :
        break
    print(data);

mysock.close()

And it yields:

b'HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\nContent-Type: text/html; charset="utf-8"\r\nContent-Length: 2788\r\nConnection: Close\r\n\r\n<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">\n

As you can see, it adds a "b" character, and ignores \r \n. The formatting is way off. Where did the 'b' come from? How can I make python format it properly? I have tried converting it to a string, prior to printing but it didn't help.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1917

Answers (1)

Dimitris Fasarakis Hilliard
Dimitris Fasarakis Hilliard

Reputation: 160427

It has a b'' because what is returned by mysock.recv is of type bytes. You should decode your byte string to a unicode one with decode:

print(data.decode('utf-8'))

Remember, Python 2 and 3 differ regarding strings as specified in PEP 3137. Python 3 offers a clear separation between text and binary data, Python 2 doesn't.

The issue here is that when print receives your bytes object, it'll call str on it which will simply build a string out of it as it knows best; i.e escape backslashes and retain the rest:

>>> str(b"hello\nworld")
"b'hello\\nworld'"

Then print will just take that and print it out.

Upvotes: 4

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