Python Requests URL with Unicode Parameters

Question

I\'m currently trying to hit the google tts url, http://translate.google.com/translate_tts with japanese characters and phrases in python using the requests library.

Answer 1

Setting the User-Agent to Mozilla/5.0 fixes this issue.

from StringIO import StringIO
import urllib
import requests

__author__ = 'jacob'

langs = {'japanese': 'ja',
         'english': 'en'}

def get_sound_file_for_text(text, download=False, lang='japanese'):

    r = StringIO()
    glang = langs[lang]
    text = text.replace('*', '')
    text = text.replace('/', '')
    text = text.replace('x', '')
    url = 'http://translate.google.com/translate_tts'
    if download:
        result = requests.get(url, params={'tl': glang, 'q': text}, headers={'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'})
        r.write(result.content)
        r.seek(0)
        return r
    else:
        return url