I am currently trying to modify a script to use the requests library instead of the urllib2 library. I haven't really used it before and I am looking to do the equivalent of urlopen("http://www.example.org").read(), so I tried the requests.get("http://www.example.org").text function.
This works fine with normal everyday html, however when I fetch from this url (https://gtfsrt.api.translink.com.au/Feed/SEQ) it doesn't seem to work.
So I wrote the below code to print out the responses from the same url using both the requests and urllib2 libraries.
import urllib2
import requests
#urllib2 request
request = urllib2.Request("https://gtfsrt.api.translink.com.au/Feed/SEQ")
result = urllib2.urlopen(request)
#requests request
result2 = requests.get("https://gtfsrt.api.translink.com.au/Feed/SEQ")
print result2.encoding
#urllib2 write to text
open("Output.txt", 'w').close()
text_file = open("Output.txt", "w")
text_file.write(result.read())
text_file.close()
open("Output2.txt", 'w').close()
text_file = open("Output2.txt", "w")
text_file.write(result2.text)
text_file.close()
The openurl().read() works fine but the requests.get().text doesn't work for the given this url. I suspect it has something to do with encoding, but i don't know what. Any thoughts?
Note: The supplied url is a feed in the google protocol buffer format, once I receive the message i give the feed to a google library that interprets it.
Your issue is that you're making the requests module interpret binary content in a response as text.
A response from the requests library has two main way to access the body of the response:
Response.content - will return the response body as a bytestringResponse.text - will decode the response body as text and return unicodeSince protocol buffers are a binary format, you should use result2.content in your code instead of result2.text.
Response.content will return the body of the response as-is, in bytes. For binary content this is exactly what you want. For text content that contains non-ASCII characters this means the content must have been encoded by the server into a bytestring using a particular encoding that is indicated by either a HTTP header or a <meta charset="..." /> tag. In order to make sense of those bytes they therefore need to be decoded after receiving using that charset.
Response.text now is a convenience method that does exactly this for you. It assumes the response body is text, and looks at the response headers to find the encoding, and decodes it for you, returning unicode.
But if your response doesn't contain text, this is the wrong method to use. Binary content doesn't contain characters, because it's not text, so the whole concept of character encoding does not make any sense for binary content - it's only applicable to text composed of characters. (That's also why you're seeing response.encoding == None - it's just bytes, there is no character encoding involved).
See Response Content and Binary Response Content in the requests documentation for more details.
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