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Asked: 2026-06-16T17:41:57+00:00

I have a very unusual problem. Am working with python 2.6 to make API

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I have a very unusual problem. Am working with python 2.6 to make API calls to a bulkSMS gateway. Now if I make the call like this

req = urllib2.Request(url)
urllib2.urlopen(req).read()

I get this(correct) response printed back to terminal

'<RESPONSE>\r<status>-4</status>\r<credits>31.3403</credits>\r</RESPONSE>'

But when I assign this output to variable,

reply = urllib2.urlopen(req).read()

I get this(incorrect) response when I print to terminal

print reply
</RESPONSE>.3403</credits>

Anybody care to explain what’s going on here?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It is interpreting the \r characters as a special character (ASCII carriage return – see here for some examples) and removing them from the string on printing. To include them, you can use the string-escape encoding:

    In [1]: resp = '<RESPONSE>\r<status>-4</status>\r<credits>31.3403</credits>\r</RESPONSE>'

In [2]: print resp
</RESPONSE>.3403</credits>

In [3]: print resp.encode('string-escape')
<RESPONSE>\r<status>-4</status>\r<credits>31.3403</credits>\r</RESPONSE>

    Not directly applicable in your case, but another way this kind of escaping is done is to prefix a string with r, which makes it a ‘raw’ string and keeps the backslashes (you’ll see this a lot with regular expression):

    In [4]: resp = r'<RESPONSE>\r<status>-4</status>\r<credits>31.3403</credits>\r</RESPONSE>'

In [5]: print resp
<RESPONSE>\r<status>-4</status>\r<credits>31.3403</credits>\r</RESPONSE>
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