Question

I have been tinkering with the following script:

#    -*- coding: utf8 -*-
import codecs
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup, NavigableString,
UnicodeDammit
import urllib2,sys
import time
try:
    import timeoutsocket # http://www.timo-tasi.org/python/timeoutsocket.py
    timeoutsocket.setDefaultSocketTimeout(10)
except ImportError:
    pass

h=u'\u3000\u3000\u4fe1\u606f\u901a\u4fe1\u6280\u672f'

address=urllib2.urlopen('http://stock.eastmoney.com/news/1408,20101022101395594.html').read()
soup=BeautifulSoup(address)

p=soup.findAll('p')
t=p[2].string[:10]

with the following output:

print t

¡¡¡¡ÐÅϢͨ

print h

　　信息通

t

u’\xa1\xa1\xa1\xa1\xd0\xc5\xcf\xa2\xcd\xa8′

h

u’\u3000\u3000\u4fe1\u606f\u901a’

h.encode(‘gbk’)

‘\xa1\xa1\xa1\xa1\xd0\xc5\xcf\xa2\xcd\xa8’

Simply put: When I pass in this html through BeautifulSoup, it takes
the gbk encoded text and thinks that it is unicode, not recognizing
that it needs to be decoded first. “h” and “t” should be the same, however,
as h is just me taking the text from the html file and converting it
manually.

how do I solve this problem?

best

wheaton

Answer 1

The file’s meta tag claims that the character set is GB2312, but the data contains a character from the newer GBK/GB18030 and this is what’s tripping BeautifulSoup up:

simon@lucifer:~$ python
Python 2.7 (r27:82508, Jul  3 2010, 21:12:11) 
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5493)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import urllib2
>>> data = urllib2.urlopen('http://stock.eastmoney.com/news/1408,20101022101395594.html').read()
>>> data.decode("gb2312")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
UnicodeDecodeError: 'gb2312' codec can't decode bytes in position 20148-20149: illegal multibyte sequence

At this point, UnicodeDammit bails out, tries chardet, UTF-8 and finally Windows-1252, which always succeeds – this is what you got, by the looks of it.

If we tell the decoder to replace unrecognised characters with a ‘?’, we can see the character that’s missing in GB2312:

>>> print data[20140:20160].decode("gb2312", "replace")
毒尾气二�英的排放难

Using the correct encoding:

>>> print data[20140:20160].decode("gb18030", "replace")
毒尾气二噁英的排放难
>>> from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
>>> s = BeautifulSoup(data, fromEncoding="gb18030")
>>> print s.findAll("p")[2].string[:10]
　　信息通信技术是&

Also:

>>> print s.findAll("p")[2].string
　　信息通信技术是“十二五”规划重点发展方向，行业具有很强的内在增长潜
力，增速远高于GDP。软件外包、服务外包、管理软件、车载导航、网上购物、网络游戏、
移动办公、移动网络游戏、网络视频等均存在很强的潜在需求，使信息技术行业继续保持较
高增长。