Question

I tried to save tables from a document as a file under a directory as follows:

for table in tables:
    tableString = html.tostring(table)
    fileref=open('c:\\Users\\ahn_133\\Desktop\\appleTables\\Apple-' + str(count) + '.htm', 'w')
    fileref.write(tableString)
    fileref.close()
    count+=1

But, I keep getting an error as follows:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#27>", line 4, in <module>
    fileref.write(tableString)
TypeError: must be str, not bytes

I am using Python 3.3 and installed lxml-3.0.1.win32-py3.3.‌exe

How can I fix this error?

Answer 1

lxml’s tostring method returns a bytestring (bytes), because it is already encoded. This is necessary because the XML/HTML document can specify its own encoding, and that better be right!

Simply open the file in binary mode:

for table in tables:
    tableString = html.tostring(table)
    filename = r'c:\Users\ahn_133\Desktop\appleTables\Apple-' +str(count)+ '.htm'
    with open(filename, 'wb') as fileref:
        #                 ^
        fileref.write(tableString)
    count+=1