POST binary data using httplib cause Unicode exceptions

Question

When i try to send an image with urllib2 the UnicodeDecodeError exception is occured.

HTTP Post body:

f = op         


        

Answer 1

You're trying to send a body containing headers and content. If you want to send content type and content length, you need to do it in the headers, not in the body:

headers = {'Content-Type': mimetype, 'Content-Length', str(size)}
request = urllib2.Request(url, data=binary, headers=headers)

If you don't set the Content-Length header, it will be automatically set to the size of data

As to your error: it's happening on the line

msg += message_body

This error can only happen, if one of these two strings is unicode, and the other str containing \xff, as in that case the latter will be automatically coecred to unicode using sys.getdefaultencoding().

My final guess would be: message_body here is your data, which is a str and contains \xff somewhere. msg is what has been passed to the HTTPConnection earlier, namely the headers, and they are unicode because you either used unicode for at least one key in your headers (the values are converted to str earlier), or you have imported unicode_literals from __futures__.