how to decode and encode web page with python?

Question

I use Beautifulsoup and urllib2 to download web pages, but different web page has a different encode method, such as utf-8,gb2312,gbk. I use urllib2 get sohu\'s home page, w

Answer 1

I know this is an old question, but I spent a while today puzzling over a particularly problematic website so I thought I'd share the solution that worked for me, which I got from here: http://shunchiubc.blogspot.com/2016/08/python-to-scrape-chinese-websites.html

Requests has a feature that will automatically get the actual encoding of the website, meaning you don't have to wrestle with encoding/decoding it (before I found this, I was getting all sorts of errors trying to encode/decode strings/bytes and never getting any output which was readable). This feature is called apparent_encoding. Here's how it worked for me:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

url = 'http://url_youre_using_here.html'
readOut = requests.get(url)
readOut.encoding = readOut.apparent_encoding #sets the encoding properly before you hand it off to BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(readOut.text, "lxml")