When the content-type of the server is 'Content-Type:text/html', requests.get() returns improperly encoded data.
However, if we have the content type explicitly as 'Content-Type:text/html; charset=utf-8', it returns properly encoded data.
Also, when we use urllib.urlopen(), it returns properly encoded data.
Has anyone noticed this before? Why does requests.get() behave like this?
Educated guesses (mentioned above) are probably just a check for Content-Type header as being sent by server (quite misleading use of educated imho).
For response header Content-Type: text/html the result is ISO-8859-1 (default for HTML4), regardless any content analysis (ie. default for HTML5 is UTF-8).
For response header Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 the result is UTF-8.
Luckily for us, requests uses chardet library and that usually works quite well (attribute requests.Response.apparent_encoding), so you usually want to do:
r = requests.get("https://martin.slouf.name/")
# override encoding by real educated guess as provided by chardet
r.encoding = r.apparent_encoding
# access the data
r.text
r.encoding = r.apparent_encoding didn't work (é showed up as é) for a web page where line 13 of 374 is <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />. However, changing to r.encoding = 'UTF-8' worked ok. One could have code to search r.text for a "Content-Type" ... charset=... entry, then set r.encoding before accessing r.text further. This would be clunky but more general than just setting the encoding to UTF-8.
r.apparent_encoding value is set by chardet library -- and of course -- it can guess wrong. You should also be aware that you should not access r.text before setting the r.encoding to desired value (using r.apparent_encoding or any method desirable). I recommend reading the chardet library docs (chardet.readthedocs.io/en/latest), if you are attempting to guess it your way -- it can offer a solution you seek.charset=... entry. Thanks!
.text on my response object. It had the badly-encoded characters. In my case, it looked like 19% ± 3%â\x96¼ for text that should actually be 19% ± 3%▼. encoding was "ISO-8859-1" and apparent_encoding was "UTF-8". By setting encoding to apparent_encoding, then getting text, it worked.From requests documentation:
When you make a request, Requests makes educated guesses about the encoding of the response based on the HTTP headers. The text encoding guessed by Requests is used when you access r.text. You can find out what encoding Requests is using, and change it, using the r.encoding property.
>>> r.encoding
'utf-8'
>>> r.encoding = 'ISO-8859-1'
Check the encoding requests used for your page, and if it's not the right one - try to force it to be the one you need.
Regarding the differences between requests and urllib.urlopen - they probably use different ways to guess the encoding. Thats all.
After getting response, take response.content instead of response.text and that will be of encoding utf-8.
response = requests.get(download_link, auth=(myUsername, myPassword), headers={'User-Agent': 'Mozilla'})
print (response.encoding)
if response.status_code is 200:
body = response.content
else:
print ("Unable to get response with Code : %d " % (response.status_code))
response.content is of type bytes, since it's the raw sequence of bytes returned as the server's response. If you are sure that the response is in UTF-8 then you can turn it into a string with response.content.decode('utf-8'), but this will fail if the response is not in fact valid UTF-8. In contrast, response.text is a str and, as commented above, is the result of automatically decoding response.content using whatever encoding Requests assumes to be the correct one based on the HTTP headers.The default assumed content encoding for text/html is ISO-8859-1 aka Latin-1 :( See RFC-2854. UTF-8 was too young to become the default, it was born in 1993, about the same time as HTML and HTTP.
Use .content to access the byte stream, or .text to access the decoded Unicode stream. If the HTTP server does not care about the correct encoding, the value of .text may be off.
content is the key
.content did the trick/worked for me +1