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Asked: 2026-06-07T17:48:07+00:00

I have a Python code that tries to read RSS sources written in Cyrillic

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I have a Python code that tries to read RSS sources written in Cyrillic letters (for example Russian). This is the code that I use:

import feedparser
from urllib2 import Request, urlopen

d=feedparser.parse(source_url)

# Make a loop over the entries of the RSS feed.
for e in d.entries:
    # Get the title of the news.
    title = e.title
    title = title.replace(' ','%20')
    title = title.encode('utf-8')

    # Get the URL of the entry.
    url = e.link
    url = url.encode('utf-8')


    # Make the request. 
    address = 'http://example.org/save_link.php?title=' + title + '&source=' + source_name + '&url=' + url

    # Submit the link.
    req = Request(address)
    f = urlopen(req)

I use encode('utf-8') since the titles are given in Cyrillic letters and it works fine. An example of the RSS source is here. The problem appears when I try to read the list of the RSS sources from another URL. In more details, there is a web-page that contains a list of RSS sources (URL of the sources as well as their names given in Cyrillic letters). An example of the list is here:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN' 'http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd'>
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
<meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html;charset=utf-8'>

ua, Корреспондент, http://k.img.com.ua/rss/ua/news.xml
ua, Українська Правда, http://www.pravda.com.ua/rss/

</body>
</html>

The problem appears when I try to apply encode(‘utf-8’) to the Cyrillic letters given in this document. I get an UnicodeDecodeError. Does anybody knows why?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    encode will only give UnicodeDecodeError if you supply it a str object which it then tries to decode to unicode; see http://wiki.python.org/moin/UnicodeDecodeError.

    You need to decode the str object to unicode first:

    name = name.decode('utf-8')

    This will take a str in UTF-8 encoding and give you a unicode object.

    It works for the code that you posted because feedparser returns feed data already decoded to unicode.

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