Question

I’m trying to open a webpage using urllib.request.urlopen() then search it with regular expressions, but that gives the following error:

TypeError: can’t use a string pattern on a bytes-like object

I understand why, urllib.request.urlopen() returns a bytestream, so re doesn’t know the encoding to use. What am I supposed to do in this situation? Is there a way to specify the encoding method in a urlrequest maybe or will I need to re-encode the string myself? If so what am I looking to do, I assume I should read the encoding from the header info or the encoding type if specified in the html and then re-encode it to that?

Answer 1

You just need to decode the response, using the Content-Type header typically the last value. There is an example given in the tutorial too.

output = response.decode('utf-8')