Develop Reference

How to extract a unicode text inside a tag?

I'm trying to collect data for my lab from this website: link
Here is my code:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
url='https://www.coursera.org/learn/applied-data-science-capstone-ar'
html=requests.get(url).text
soup=BeautifulSoup(html,'lxml')
info=soup.find('div',class_='_1wb6qi0n')
title=info.find('h1',class_='banner-title banner-title-without--subtitle m-b-0')
print(title)
I expect title would be كابستون علوم البيانات التطبيقية
but the result is منهجية علم البيانات.
What is the problem? And how do I fix it?
Thank you for taking time to answer.

The issue you are facing is due to improper encoding when fetching the URL using requests.get() function. By default the pages requested via requests library have a default encoding of ISO-8859-1 which results in the incorrect encoding of the html itself. In order to force a proper encoding for the requested page, you need to change the encoding using the encoding attribute of the requested page. For this to work the line requests.get(url).text has to be broken like so:
...
# Request the URL and store the request
request = requests.get(url)
# Change the encoding before extracting the text
# Automatically infer encoding
request.encoding = request.apparent_encoding
# Now extract the HTML as text
html = request.text
...
In the above code snippet, request.apparent_encoding will automatically infer the encoding of the page without having to forcefully specify one or the other encoding.
So, the final code would be as follows:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
url = 'https://www.coursera.org/learn/applied-data-science-capstone-ar'
request = requests.get(url)
request.encoding = request.apparent_encoding
html = request.text
soup = BeautifulSoup(html,'lxml')
info = soup.find('div',class_='_1wb6qi0n')
title = info.find('h1',class_='banner-title banner-title-without--subtitle m-b-0')
print(title.text)
PS: You must call title.text before printing to print the inner content of the tag.
Output:
كابستون علوم البيانات التطبيقية

What were causing the error is the encoding of the html data.
Arabic letters need 2 bytes to show
You need to set html data encoding to UTF-8
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
url='https://www.coursera.org/learn/applied-data-science-capstone-ar'
html=requests.get(url)
html.encoding = html.apparent_encoding
soup=BeautifulSoup(html.text,'lxml')
info=soup.find('div',class_='_1wb6qi0n')
title=info.find('h1',class_='banner-title banner-title-without--subtitle m-b-0').get_text()
print(title)
In above apparent_encoding will automatically set the encoding to what suits the data
OUTPUT :
كابستون علوم البيانات التطبيقية

There a nice library called ftfy. It has multiple language support.
Installation: pip install ftfy
Try this:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import ftfy
import requests
url='https://www.coursera.org/learn/applied-data-science-capstone-ar'
html=requests.get(url).text
soup=BeautifulSoup(html,'lxml')
info=soup.find('div',class_='_1wb6qi0n')
title=info.find('h1',class_='banner-title banner-title-without--subtitle m-b-0').text
title = ftfy.fix_text(title)
print(title)
Output:
كابستون علوم البيانات التطبيقية

I think you need to use UTF8 encoding/decoding! and if your problem is in terminal i think you have no solution, but if your result environment is in another environment like web pages, you can see true that!

How to fix Cyrillic characters while web-scraping with Python

I'm scraping a Cyrillic website with python using BeautifulSoup, but I'm having some trouble, every word is showing like this:
СилÑановÑка Ðавкова во Ðази
I also tried some other Cyrillic websites, but they are working good.
My code is this:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
source = requests.get('https://').text
soup = BeautifulSoup(source, 'lxml')
print(soup.prettify())
How should I fix it?

requests fails to detect it as utf-8.
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
source = requests.get('https://time.mk/') # don't convert to text just yet
# print(source.encoding)
# prints out ISO-8859-1
source.encoding = 'utf-8' # override encoding manually
soup = BeautifulSoup(source.text, 'lxml') # this will now decode utf-8 correctly

BeautifulSoup: Getting empty variables

I have been trying to get the value of some variables of a web page:
itemPage='https://dadosabertos.camara.leg.br/api/v2/legislaturas/1'
url = urlopen(itemPage)
soupItem=BeautifulSoup(url,'lxml')
dataInicio=soupItem.find('dataInicio')
dataFim=soupItem.find('dataFim')
However, dataInicio and dataFim are empty. What am I doing wrong?

There are a couple of issues here. First, soup expects a string as input; check your url and see that it's actually <http.client.HTTPResponse object at 0x036D7770>. You can read() it, which produces a JSON byte string which is usable. But if you'd prefer to stick with XML parsing, I'd recommend using Python's request library to obtain a raw XML string (pass in correct headers to specify XML).
Secondly, when you create your soup object, you need to pass in features="xml" instead of "lxml".
Putting it all together:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
item_page = "https://dadosabertos.camara.leg.br/api/v2/legislaturas/1"
response = requests.get(item_page, headers={"accept": "application/xml"})
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, "xml")
data_inicio = soup.find("dataInicio")
data_fim = soup.find("dataFim")
print(data_inicio)
print(data_fim)
Output:
<dataInicio>1826-04-29</dataInicio>
<dataFim>1830-04-24</dataFim>

Unable to extract data from BeautifulSoup object after utf-8 conversion due to 'str' typecasting

I'm trying to build my own web scraper using Python. One of the steps involves parsing an HTML page, for which I am using BeautifulSoup, which is the parser recommended in most tutorials. Here is my code which should extract the page and print it:
import urllib
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
urlToRead = "http://www.randomjoke.com/topic/haha.php"
handle = urllib.urlopen(urlToRead)
htmlGunk = handle.read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(htmlGunk, "html.parser")
soup = soup.prettify()
print (soup)
However, there seems to be an error when I do soup.prettify() and then print it. The error is:
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa9' in
position 16052: ordinal not in range(128)
To resolve this, I googled further and came across this answer of SO which resolved it. I basically had to set the encoding to 'utf=8' which I did. So here is the modded code (last 2 lines only):
soup = soup.prettify().encode('utf-8')
print (soup)
This works just fine. The problem arises when I try to use the soup.get_text() method as mentioned on a tutorial here. Whenever I do soup.get_text(), I get an error:
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'get_text'
I think this is expected since I'm encoding the soup to 'utf-8' and it's changing it to a str. I tried printing type(soup) before and after utf-8 conversion and as expected, before conversion it was an Object of the bs4.BeautifulSoup class and after, it was str.
How do I work around this? I'm pretty sure I'm doing something wrong and there's a proper way around this. Unfortunately, I'm not too familiar with Python, so please bear with me

You should not discard your original soup object. You can call soup.prettify().encode('utf-8') when you need to print it (or save it into a different variable).

import urllib
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
urlToRead = "http://www.randomjoke.com/topic/haha.php"
handle = urllib.urlopen(urlToRead)
htmlGunk = handle.read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(htmlGunk, "html.parser")
html_code = soup.prettify().encode('utf-8')
text = soup.get_text().encode('utf-8')
print html_code
print "#################"
print text
# a = soup.find()
# l = []
# for i in a.next_elements:
# l.append(i)

how to decode and encode web page with python?

I use Beautifulsoup and urllib2 to download web pages, but different web page has a different encode method, such as utf-8,gb2312,gbk. I use urllib2 get sohu's home page, which is encoded with gbk, but in my code ,i also use this way to decode its web page:
self.html_doc = self.html_doc.decode('gb2312','ignore')
But how can I konw the encode method the pages use before I use BeautifulSoup to decode them to unicode? In most Chinese website, there is no content-type in http Header's field.

Using BeautifulSoup you can parse the HTML and access the original_encoding attrbute:
import urllib2
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
html = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.sohu.com').read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
>>> soup.original_encoding
u'gbk'
And this agrees with the encoding declared in the <meta> tag in the HTML's <head>:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=GBK" />
>>> soup.meta['content']
u'text/html; charset=GBK'
Now you can decode the HTML:
decoded_html = html.decode(soup.original_encoding)
but there not much point since the HTML is already available as unicode:
>>> soup.a['title']
u'\u641c\u72d0-\u4e2d\u56fd\u6700\u5927\u7684\u95e8\u6237\u7f51\u7ad9'
>>> print soup.a['title']
搜狐-中国最大的门户网站
>>> soup.a.text
u'\u641c\u72d0'
>>> print soup.a.text
搜狐
It is also possible to attempt to detect it using the chardet module (although it is a bit slow):
>>> import chardet
>>> chardet.detect(html)
{'confidence': 0.99, 'encoding': 'GB2312'}

Another solution.
from simplified_scrapy.request import req
from simplified_scrapy.simplified_doc import SimplifiedDoc
html = req.get('http://www.sohu.com') # This will automatically help you find the correct encoding
doc = SimplifiedDoc(html)
print (doc.title.text)

I know this is an old question, but I spent a while today puzzling over a particularly problematic website so I thought I'd share the solution that worked for me, which I got from here: http://shunchiubc.blogspot.com/2016/08/python-to-scrape-chinese-websites.html
Requests has a feature that will automatically get the actual encoding of the website, meaning you don't have to wrestle with encoding/decoding it (before I found this, I was getting all sorts of errors trying to encode/decode strings/bytes and never getting any output which was readable). This feature is called apparent_encoding. Here's how it worked for me:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
url = 'http://url_youre_using_here.html'
readOut = requests.get(url)
readOut.encoding = readOut.apparent_encoding #sets the encoding properly before you hand it off to BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(readOut.text, "lxml")