Reading a github file using python returns HTML tags

Question

I am trying to read a text file saved in github using requests package. Here is the python code I am using:

    import requests
    url = \'https://github.co         


        

Answer 1

There are some good solutions already, but if you use requests just follow Github's API.

The endpoint for all content is

GET /repos/:owner/:repo/contents/:path

But keep in mind that the default behavior of Github's API is to encode the content using base64.

In your case you would do the following:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import base64
import requests


url = 'https://api.github.com/repos/{user}/{repo_name}/contents/{path_to_file}'
req = requests.get(url)
if req.status_code == requests.codes.ok:
    req = req.json()  # the response is a JSON
    # req is now a dict with keys: name, encoding, url, size ...
    # and content. But it is encoded with base64.
    content = base64.decodestring(req['content'])
else:
    print('Content was not found.')