Question

I’m learning Python and the project I’ve currently set myself includes sending a question from my laptop connected to the net, connect to the MIT START NLP database, enter the question, retrieve the response and display the response. I’ve read through the “HOWTO Fetch Internet Resources Using urllib2” at docs.python.org but I seem to be missing some poignant bit of this idea. Here’s my code:

import urllib
import urllib2

question = raw_input("What is your question? ")

url = 'http://start.csail.mit.edu/'
values = question

data = urllib.urlencode(values)
req = urllib2.Request(url, data)
response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
the_page = response.read()

print the_page

and here’s the error I’m getting:

Traceback (most recent call last): File “mitstart.py”, line 9, in

data = urllib.urlencode(values) File “/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py”, line 1298, in urlencode
raise TypeError TypeError: not a valid non-string sequence or mapping object

So I’m thinking that the way I set question in vales was wrong, so I did

values = {question}

and values = (question)

and values = ('question')

with no joy.

(I know, and my response is “I’m learning, it’s late, and suddenly my wife decided she needed to talk to me about something trivial while I was trying to figure this out)

Can I get some guidance or at least get pointed in the right direction?

Answer 1

urllib.urlencode() doesn’t accept a string as an argument.

As @ernie said you should specify query parameter. Also the url is missing the /startfarm.cgi part:

<form method="post" action="startfarm.cgi">

Updated example:

import cgi
from urllib import urlencode
from urllib2 import urlopen

data = urlencode(dict(query=raw_input("What is your question?"))).encode('ascii')
response = urlopen("http://start.csail.mit.edu/startfarm.cgi", data)

# extract encoding from Content-Type and print the response
_, params = cgi.parse_header(response.headers.get('Content-Type', ''))
print response.read().decode(params['charset'])