Question

I’m attempting to pull some data off a popular browser based game, but am having trouble with some decoding errors:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

r = requests.get("http://www.neopets.com/")
p = BeautifulSoup(r.text)

This produces the following stack trace:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "build/bdist.linux-x86_64/egg/bs4/__init__.py", line 172, in __init__

File "build/bdist.linux-x86_64/egg/bs4/__init__.py", line 185, in _feed

File "build/bdist.linux-x86_64/egg/bs4/builder/_lxml.py", line 195, in feed
File "parser.pxi", line 1187, in lxml.etree._FeedParser.close    (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:87912)
File "parsertarget.pxi", line 130, in lxml.etree._TargetParserContext._handleParseResult (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:97055)
File "lxml.etree.pyx", line 294, in lxml.etree._ExceptionContext._raise_if_stored (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:8862)
File "saxparser.pxi", line 274, in lxml.etree._handleSaxCData (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:93385)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xb1 in position 476: invalid start byte

Doing the following:

print repr(r.text[476 - 10: 476 + 10])

Produces:

u'ttp-equiv="X-UA-Comp'

I’m really not sure what the issue here is. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

.text on a response returns a decoded unicode value, but perhaps you should let BeautifulSoup do the decoding for you:

p = BeautifulSoup(r.content, from_encoding=r.encoding)

r.content returns the un-decoded raw bytestring, and r.encoding is the encoding detected from the headers.