Question

I’m trying to learn python, so I decided to write a script that could translate something using google translate. Till now I wrote this:

import sys
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import urllib2
import urllib

data = {'sl':'en','tl':'it','text':'word'} 
request = urllib2.Request('http://www.translate.google.com', urllib.urlencode(data))

request.add_header('User-Agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; it; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11')
opener = urllib2.build_opener()
feeddata = opener.open(request).read()
#print feeddata
soup = BeautifulSoup(feeddata)
print soup.find('span', id="result_box")
print request.get_method()

And now I’m stuck. I can’t see any bugs in it, but it still doesn’t work (by that I mean that the script will run, but it wont translate the word).

Does anyone know how to fix it?
(Sorry for my poor English)

Answer 1

Google translate is meant to be used with a GET request and not a POST request. However, urrllib2 will automatically submit a POST if you add any data to your request.

The solution is to construct the url with a querystring so you will be submitting a GET.
You’ll need to alter the request = urllib2.Request('http://www.translate.google.com', urllib.urlencode(data)) line of your code.

Here goes:

querystring = urllib.urlencode(data)
request = urllib2.Request('http://www.translate.google.com' + '?' + querystring )

And you will get the following output:

<span id="result_box" class="short_text">
    <span title="word" onmouseover="this.style.backgroundColor='#ebeff9'" onmouseout="this.style.backgroundColor='#fff'">
        parola
    </span>
</span>

By the way, you’re kinda breaking Google’s terms of service; look into them if you’re doing more than hacking a little script for training.

Using requests

I strongly advise you to stay away from urllib if possible, and use the excellent requests library, which will allow you to efficiently use HTTP with Python.