Change python byte type to string

Question

I'm using python to play with the stackoverflow API. I run the following commands:

f = urllib.request.urlopen('http://api.stackoverflow.com/1.0/stats')
d = f.read()

The type of d is class 'bytes' and if I print it it looks like:

b'\x1f\x8b\x08\x00\x00\x00 .... etc

I tried d=f.read().decode('utf-8') as that is the charset indicated in the header, but I get a 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x8b in position 1" error message

How do I convert the byte object I received from my urllib.request call to a string?

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 12:26:48Z

6

Check to make sure your response body is not gzipped. Believe its transfer encoding or such for the response header, i have a high confidence that your dealing with compressed data and not character set encoding issues.

update: Realizing I have a bad habit of not explaining/providing enough detail. For Python gzip'd byte strings they always start with 1f8b Someone explains it better here https://stackoverflow.com/a/3703300/9908

edited May 23, 2017 at 12:26

CommunityBot

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answered Sep 19, 2010 at 18:51

David

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1 Comment

amccormack Over a year ago

you got it. I solved it with the following: import zlib decompressed_data=zlib.decompress(f.read(), 16+zlib.MAX_WBITS)

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