cookies
cookies

Reputation: 347

Data returned from urllib query is incorrectly encoded

I am scraping some data from google images and have found that letters such as 'î' are being decoded incorrectly. In this case 'î' becomes 'î'. I have stored data from a google query in an object and it's in the format of:

{"key":"value"}

however, the values of the dictionary can contain other characters such as:

{"key":"File:Blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus), Parc du Rouge-Cloître, Brussels ( 32781868883).jpg"}

which when I received the data is in the form

{"key":"File:Blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus), Parc du Rouge-Clo\xc3\xaetre, Brussels ( 32781868883).jpg"}

So the when I try to convert it to bytes and decode using:

decoded_obj = bytes(raw_obj, 'utf-8').decode('unicode_escape')

I get the output

{"key":"File:Blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus), Parc du Rouge-Cloître, Brussels ( 32781868883).jpg"}

The scrapers code is as follows:

import urllib.request
import json

url = 'https://www.google.com/search?q=Blue+tit+(Cyanistes+caeruleus),+Parc+du+Rouge-Clo%C3%AEtre,+Brussels+(32781868883).jpg&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiE8866stfjAhWBolwKHQ1YCdQQ_AUIESgB&biw=1920&bih=937'

headers = {}
headers['User-Agent'] = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3770.100 Safari/537.36'
request = urllib.request.Request(url, headers=headers)
response = urllib.request.urlopen(request)
data = str(response.read())

start_line = data.find('class="rg_meta notranslate">')
start_obj = data.find('{', start_line + 1)
end_obj = data.find('</div>', start_obj + 1)
raw_obj = str(data[start_obj:end_obj])

decoded_obj = bytes(raw_obj, 'utf-8').decode('unicode_escape')
final_obj = json.loads(decoded_obj)

print(final_obj)

Upvotes: 0

Views: 136

Answers (1)

snakecharmerb
snakecharmerb

Reputation: 55629

The response data consists of UTF-8 encoded bytes:

>>> response = urllib.request.urlopen(request)
>>> res = response.read()
>>> type(res)
<class 'bytes'>
>>> response.headers
<http.client.HTTPMessage object at 0x7ff6ea74ba90>
>>> response.headers['Content-type']                                                                                           
'text/html; charset=UTF-8'  

The correct way to handle this is to decode the response data:

>>> data = response.read().decode('utf-8')

Once this is done, data is a str and there is no need for any further decoding or encoding (or str() or bytes() calls).

In general, calling str on a bytes instance is the wrong thing to do, unless you provide the appropriate encoding:

>>> s = 'spam'
>>> bs = s.encode('utf-8')
>>> str(bs)
"b'spam'"   # Now 'b' is inside the string
>>> 

>>> str(bs, encoding='utf-8')
'spam'

Upvotes: 1

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