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Asked: 2026-05-11T12:55:19+00:00

The following Python code uses BeautifulStoneSoup to fetch the LibraryThing API information for Tolkien’s

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The following Python code uses BeautifulStoneSoup to fetch the LibraryThing API information for Tolkien’s ‘The Children of Húrin’.

import urllib2  from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup  URL = ('http://www.librarything.com/services/rest/1.0/'             '?method=librarything.ck.getwork&id=1907912'             '&apikey=2a2e596b887f554db2bbbf3b07ff812a')  soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(urllib2.urlopen(URL),                           convertEntities=BeautifulStoneSoup.ALL_ENTITIES) title_field = soup.find('field', attrs={'name': 'canonicaltitle'}) print title_field.find('fact').string

Unfortunately, instead of ‘Húrin’, it prints out ‘Húrin’. This is obviously an encoding issue, but I can’t work out what I need to do to get the expected output. Help would be greatly appreciated.

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1 Answer

  1. In the source of the web page it looks like this: The Children of Húrin. So the encoding is already broken somewhere on their side before it even gets converted to XML…

    If it’s a general issue with all the books and you need to work around it, this seems to work:

    unicode(title_field.find('fact').string).encode('latin1').decode('utf-8')
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