Modern Python Cookbook

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Decoding bytes – how to get proper characters from some bytes

How can we work with files that aren't properly encoded? What do we do with files written in ASCII encoding?

A download from the internet is almost always in bytes—not characters. How do we decode the characters from that stream of bytes?

Also, when we use the subprocess module, the results of an OS command are in bytes. How can we recover proper characters?

Much of this is also relevant to the material in Chapter 10, Input/Output, Physical Format and Logical Layout. We've included this recipe here because it's the inverse of the previous recipe, Encoding strings – creating ASCII and UTF-8 bytes.

Getting ready

Let's say we're interested in offshore marine weather forecasts. Perhaps this is because we own a large sailboat, or perhaps because good friends of ours have a large sailboat and are departing the Chesapeake Bay for the Caribbean.

Are there any special warnings coming from the National Weather Services office in Wakefield, Virginia?

Here's where we can get the warnings: https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=CRH&issuedby=AKQ&product=SMW&format=TXT.

We can download this with Python's urllib module:

>>> import urllib.request
>>> warnings_uri= 'https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=CRH&issuedby=AKQ&product=SMW&format=TXT'
>>> with urllib.request.urlopen(warnings_uri) as source:
...     warnings_text = source.read()

Or, we can use programs like curl or wget to get this. At the OS Terminal prompt, we might run the following (long) command:

$ curl 'https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=CRH&issuedby=AKQ&product=SMW&format=TXT' -o AKQ.html

Typesetting this book tends to break the command onto many lines. It's really one very long line.

The code repository includes a sample file, Chapter_01/National Weather Service Text Product Display.html.

The forecast_text value is a stream of bytes. It's not a proper string. We can tell because it starts like this:

>>> warnings_text[:80]
b'<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.or'

The data goes on for a while, providing details from the web page. Because the displayed value starts with b', it's bytes, not proper Unicode characters. It was probably encoded with UTF-8, which means some characters could have weird-looking \xnn escape sequences instead of proper characters. We want to have the proper characters.

While this data has many easy-to-read characters, the b' prefix shows that it's a collection of byte values, not proper text. Generally, a bytes object behaves somewhat like a string object. Sometimes, we can work with bytes directly. Most of the time, we'll want to decode the bytes and create proper Unicode characters from them.

How to do it…

Determine the coding scheme if possible. In order to decode bytes to create proper Unicode characters, we need to know what encoding scheme was used. When we read XML documents, there's a big hint provided within the document:
```
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
```
When browsing web pages, there's often a header containing this information:
```
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-4
```
Sometimes, an HTML page may include this as part of the header:
```
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
```
In other cases, we're left to guess. In the case of US weather data, a good first guess is UTF-8. Other good guesses include ISO-8859-1. In some cases, the guess will depend on the language.
The codecs — Codec registry and base classes section of the Python Standard Library lists the standard encodings available. Decode the data:
```
>>> document = forecast_text.decode("UTF-8")
>>> document[:80]
'<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.or'
```
The b' prefix is no longer used to show that these are bytes. We've created a proper string of Unicode characters from the stream of bytes.
If this step fails with an exception, we guessed wrong about the encoding. We need to try another encoding. Parse the resulting document.

Since this is an HTML document, we should use Beautiful Soup. See http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/.

We can, however, extract one nugget of information from this document without completely parsing the HTML:

>>> import re
>>> title_pattern = re.compile(r"\<h3\>(.*?)\</h3\>")
>>> title_pattern.search( document )
<_sre.SRE_Match object; span=(3438, 3489), match='<h3>There are no products active at this time.</h>

This tells us what we need to know: there are no warnings at this time. This doesn't mean smooth sailing, but it does mean that there aren't any major weather systems that could cause catastrophes.

How it works...

See the Encoding strings – creating ASCII and UTF-8 bytes recipe for more information on Unicode and the different ways that Unicode characters can be encoded into streams of bytes.

At the foundation of the operating system, files and network connections are built up from bytes. It's our software that decodes the bytes to discover the content. It might be characters, images, or sounds. In some cases, the default assumptions are wrong and we need to do our own decoding.

Decoding bytes – how to get proper characters from some bytes

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works...

See also