Develop Reference

requests.Response.text shows odd symbols

I use Python's request library to access (public) ads.txt files:
import requests
r = requests.get('https://www.sicurauto.it/ads.txt')
print(r.text)
This works fine in most cases, but the text from the URL above begins with some strange symbols:
> google.com, [...]
If I open the URL in my browser, I do not see these three symbols; the text begins with google.com, [...] I am a beginner when it comes to encodings and web protocols ... where might these odd symbols come from?

You need to specify your encoding (in r.encoding) before calling r.text:
import requests
r = requests.get('https://www.sicurauto.it/ads.txt')
r.encoding = 'utf-8-sig' # specify UTF-8-sig encoding
print(r.text)

Open file as string instead of bytes in python

I am working on a project that reads a url which contains an ICS file (icalendar). Instead of reading it as a string it prints as bytes need some advice on this.
import requests
url = "http://ical.keele.ac.uk/index.php/ical/ical/15021113"
c = requests.get(url)
c.encoding = 'ISO-8859-1'
print(c.content)
Expected return
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//hacksw/handcal//NONSGML v1.0//EN
BEGIN:VEVENT
Actual return
b"BEGIN:VCALENDAR\rVERSION:2.0\rPRODID:-//hacksw/handcal//NONSGML v1.0//EN\rBEGIN:VEVENT\r
I have tried using the ics file directly and works without any problems but when I request from url it doesnt work. Thanks

Delirious Lettuce is right, just use text:
http://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/user/quickstart/#response-content
import requests
url = "http://ical.keele.ac.uk/index.php/ical/ical/15021113"
c = requests.get(url)
#c.encoding = 'ISO-8859-1'
#print(c.content)
print(c.text[:10])
results in
BEGIN:VCAL
(3.6.1 32 bit windows)

Latin encoding issue

I am working on a python web scraper to extract data from this webpage. It contains latin characters like ą, č, ę, ė, į, š, ų, ū, ž. I use BeautifulSoup to recognise the encoding:
def decode_html(html_string):
converted = UnicodeDammit(html_string)
print(converted.original_encoding)
if not converted.unicode_markup:
raise UnicodeDecodeError(
"Failed to detect encoding, tried [%s]",
', '.join(converted.tried_encodings))
return converted.unicode_markup
The encoding that it always seems to use is "windows-1252". However, this turns characters like ė into ë and ų into ø when printing to file or console. I use the lxml library to scrape the data. So I would think that it uses the wrong encoding, but what's odd is that if I use lxml.html.open_in_browser(decoded_html), all the characters are back to normal. How do I print the characters to a file without all the mojibake?
This is what I am using for output:
def write(filename, obj):
with open(filename, "w", encoding="utf-8") as output:
json.dump(obj, output, cls=CustomEncoder, ensure_ascii=False)
return

From the HTTP headers set on the specific webpage you tried to load:
Content-Type:text/html; charset=windows-1257
so Windows-1252 will result in invalid results. BeautifulSoup made a guess (based on statistical models), and guessed wrong. As you noticed, using 1252 instead leads to incorrect codepoints:
>>> 'ė'.encode('cp1257').decode('cp1252')
'ë'
>>> 'ų'.encode('cp1257').decode('cp1252')
'ø'
CP1252 is the fallback for the base characterset detection implementation in BeautifulSoup. You can improve the success-rate of BeautifulSoup's character-detection code by installing an external library; both chardet and cchardet are supported. These two libraries guess at MacCyrillic and ISO-8859-13, respectively (both wrong, but cchardet got pretty close, perhaps close enough).
In this specific case, you can make use of the HTTP headers instead. In requests, I generally use:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from bs4.dammit import EncodingDetector
resp = requests.get(url)
http_encoding = resp.encoding if 'charset' in resp.headers.get('content-type', '').lower() else None
html_encoding = EncodingDetector.find_declared_encoding(resp.content, is_html=True)
encoding = html_encoding or http_encoding
soup = BeautifulSoup(resp.content, 'lxml', from_encoding=encoding)
The above only uses the encoding from the response if explicitly set by the server, and there was no HTML <meta> header. For text/* mime-types, HTTP specifies that the response should be considered as using Latin-1, which requests adheres too, but that default would be incorrect for most HTML data.

Can't extract JSON from an http request

I'm having problems getting data from an HTTP response. The format unfortunately comes back with '\n' attached to all the key/value pairs. JSON says it must be a str and not "bytes".
I have tried a number of fixes so my list of includes might look weird/redundant. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import urllib.request
from urllib.request import urlopen
import json
import requests
url = "http://finance.google.com/finance/info?client=ig&q=NASDAQ,AAPL"
response = urlopen(url)
content = response.read()
print(content)
data = json.loads(content)
info = data[0]
print(info)
#got this far - planning to extract "id:" "22144"

When it comes to making requests in Python, I personally like to use the requests library. I find it easier to use.
import json
import requests
r = requests.get('http://finance.google.com/finance/info?client=ig&q=NASDAQ,AAPL')
json_obj = json.loads(r.text[4:])
print(json_obj[0].get('id'))
The above solution prints: 22144
The response data had a couple unnecessary characters at the head, which is why I am only loading the relevant (json) portion of the response: r.text[4:]. This is the reason why you couldn't load it as json initially.

Bytes object has method decode() which converts bytes to string. Checking the response in the browser, seems there are some extra characters at the beginning of the string that needs to be removed (a line feed character, followed by two slashes: '\n//'). To skip the first three characters from the string returned by the decode() method we add [3:] after the method call.
data = json.loads(content.decode()[3:])
print(data[0]['id'])
The output is exactly what you expect:
22144

JSON says it must be a str and not "bytes".
Your content is "bytes", and you can do this as below.
data = json.loads(content.decode())

Loading url with cyrillic symbols

I have to load some url with cyrillic symbols. My script should work with this:
http://wincode.org/%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5/
If I'll use this in browser it would replaced into normal symbols, but urllib code fails with 404 error. How to decode correctly this url?
When I'm using that url directly in code, like address = 'that address', it works perfect. But I used parsing page for getting this url. I have a list of urls which contents cyrillic. Maybe they have uncorrect encoding? Here is more code:
requestData = urllib2.Request( %SOME_ADDRESS%, None, {"User-Agent": user_agent})
requestHandler = pageHandler.open(requestData)
pageData = requestHandler.read().decode('utf-8')
soupHandler = BeautifulSoup(pageData)
topicLinks = []
for postBlock in soupHandler.findAll('a', href=re.compile('%SOME_REGEXP%')):
topicLinks.append(postBlock['href'])
postAddress = choice(topicLinks)
postRequestData = urllib2.Request(postAddress, None, {"User-Agent": user_agent})
postHandler = pageHandler.open(postRequestData)
postData = postHandler.read()
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 518, in http_error_default
raise HTTPError(req.get_full_url(), code, msg, hdrs, fp)
urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 404: Not Found

I have a list of urls which contents cyrillic.
OK, if it contains raw (not %-encoded) Cyrillic characters that's not like the example, and in fact it isn't a URL at all.
An address with non-ASCII characters in it is known as an IRI. IRIs shouldn't be used in an HTML link, but browsers tend to fix up these mistakes.
To convert an IRI to a URI which you can then open with urllib, you have to:
encode non-ASCII characters in the hostname part using Punycode (IDNA).
encode non-ASCII characters in rest of the IRI to UTF-8 bytes and URL-encode them (resulting in %D0%BF... like in the example URL).
an example implementation.

You can try to use the urllib.unquote method.
>>> import urllib
>>> string = urllib.unquote("http://wincode.org/%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5/")
>>> print string.decode("utf-8")
http://wincode.org/программирование/

the following code worked for me (modified code from Arseny above):
import urllib.parse
string='http://wincode.org/%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5/'
string = urllib.parse.unquote(string,encoding='utf-8') # http://wincode.org/программирование/