Parsing UTF-8/unicode strings with lxml HTML
Ok and just found. Writing the question on StackOverflow helps often.
etree.HTML() is trying to guess the encoding according to the meta in the document
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=EUC-JP"/>
In this case, I have converted manually the document to utf-8, which means it is not anymore the Japanese encoding: EUC-JP. So to solve the issue is just a matter of forcing the HTML parser to understand utf-8. In our case the code becomes:
>>> myparser = etree.HTMLParser(encoding="utf-8")
>>> tree = etree.HTML(htmltext, parser=myparser)
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Bayleef
Have been making things with the Web since 1991 or 1992. Python, Web technologies and a few other things. Currently working for Mozilla, always opened to proposals. Linkedin Profile Previous employers: Opera Software Pheromone Web Agency W3C - World Wide Web Consortium
Updated on June 22, 2022Comments
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Bayleef almost 2 years
I have been trying to parse with etree.HTML() a text encoded as UTF-8 without success.
→ python Python 2.7.1 (r271:86832, Jun 16 2011, 16:59:05) [GCC 4.2.1 (Based on Apple Inc. build 5658) (LLVM build 2335.15.00)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> from lxml import etree >>> import requests >>> headers = {'User-Agent': "Opera/9.80 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8.0) Presto/2.12.363 Version/12.50"} >>> r = requests.get("http://www.rakuten.co.jp/", headers=headers) >>> r.status_code 200 >>> r.headers {'x-cache': 'MISS from www.rakuten.co.jp', 'transfer-encoding': 'chunked', 'set-cookie': 'wPzd=lng%3DNA%3Acnt%3DCA; expires=Tue, 13-Aug-2013 16:51:38 GMT; path=/; domain=www.rakuten.co.jp', 'server': 'Apache', 'pragma': 'no-cache', 'cache-control': 'private', 'date': 'Mon, 13 Aug 2012 16:51:38 GMT', 'content-type': 'text/html; charset=EUC-JP'} >>> responsetext = r.textSo far so good. The response text is good and it is a unicode string. Now if I'm trying to get the list of CSS URIs. No issue either.
>>> tree = etree.HTML(responsetext) >>> csspathlist = tree.xpath('//link[@rel="stylesheet"]/@href') >>> csspathlist ['http://a.ichiba.jp.rakuten-static.com/com/inc/home/20080930/opt/css/normal/common.css?v=1207111500', 'http://a.ichiba.jp.rakuten-static.com/com/inc/home/20080930/opt/css/normal/layout.css?v=1207111500', 'http://a.ichiba.jp.rakuten-static.com/com/inc/home/20080930/opt/css/normal/sidecolumn.css?v=1207111500', 'http://a.ichiba.jp.rakuten-static.com/com/inc/home/20080930/beta/css/liquid/api.css?v=1207111500', '/com/inc/home/20080930/beta/css/liquid/myrakuten_dpgs.css', 'http://a.ichiba.jp.rakuten-static.com/com/inc/home/20080930/opt/css/normal/leftcolumn.css?v=1207111500', 'http://a.ichiba.jp.rakuten-static.com/com/inc/home/20080930/opt/css/normal/header.css?v=1207111500', '/com/inc/home/20080930/opt/css/normal/footer.css', 'http://a.ichiba.jp.rakuten-static.com/com/inc/home/20080930/beta/css/liquid/ipad.css', 'http://a.ichiba.jp.rakuten-static.com/com/inc/home/20080930/opt/css/normal/genre.css?v=1207111500', 'http://a.ichiba.jp.rakuten-static.com/com/inc/home/20080930/opt/css/normal/supersale.css?v=1207111500', '/com/inc/home/20080930/beta/css/liquid/rakuten_membership.css', 'http://a.ichiba.jp.rakuten-static.com/com/inc/home/20080930/beta/css/noscript/set.css?v=1207111500', 'http://a.ichiba.jp.rakuten-static.com/com/inc/home/20080930/beta/css/liquid/suggest-2.0.1.css?v=1204231500', 'http://a.ichiba.jp.rakuten-static.com/com/inc/home/20080930/beta/css/liquid/liquid_banner.css?v=1203011138', 'http://a.ichiba.jp.rakuten-static.com/com/inc/home/20080930/beta/css/liquid/area_announce.css?v=1203011138']Now let's change from unicode to UTF-8 and request again the list of CSS URIs.
>>> htmltext = responsetext.encode('utf-8') >>> tree2 = etree.HTML(htmltext) >>> csspathlist2 = tree2.xpath('//link[@rel="stylesheet"]/@href') >>> csspathlist2 []I get an empty list.
>>> etree.tostring(tree2) '<html lang="ja" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#" xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml"><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=EUC-JP"/><meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css"/><meta http-equiv="Content-Script-Type" content="text/javascript"/><title/></head></html>'Indeed, the second parsing stopped right away after the first Japanese character in the title.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Script-Type" content="text/javascript"/> <title> 【楽天市場】Shopping is Entertainment! ： インターネット最大級の通信販売、通販オンラインショッピングコミュニティ </title>I'm still trying to understand what I have done wrong.
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Andreas Jung over 11 years+1 for the good write up
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Bayleef over 11 years@Maulwurfn thanks. Found the answer after searching for 3 hours. Finally in a matter of a few minutes I figured out once I had written it properly.
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