BeautifulSoup Prettify fails on copyright symbol

Question

I am getting a Unicode error: UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character u'\xa9' in position 822: character maps to <undefined>

This appears to be a standard copyright symbol, and in the HTML is &copy. I have not been able to find a way past this. I even tried a custom function to replace copy with a space but that also failed with the same error.

import sys
import pprint
import mechanize
import cookielib
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import html2text
import lxml

def MakePretty():

def ChangeCopy(S):
    return S.replace(chr(169)," ")
br = mechanize.Browser()

# Cookie Jar
cj = cookielib.LWPCookieJar()
br.set_cookiejar(cj)

# Browser options
br.set_handle_equiv(True)
#br.set_handle_gzip(True)
br.set_handle_redirect(True)
br.set_handle_referer(True)
br.set_handle_robots(False)

# Follows refresh 0 but not hangs on refresh > 0
br.set_handle_refresh(mechanize._http.HTTPRefreshProcessor(), max_time=1)

# User-Agent (this is cheating, ok?)
br.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008071615 Fedora/3.0.1-1.fc9 Firefox/3.0.1')]

# The site we will navigate into, handling its session
# Open the site
br.open('http://www.thesitewizard.com/faqs/copyright-symbol.shtml')
html = br.response().read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
print soup.prettify()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    MakePretty()

How do I get prettify past the copyright symbol? I have searched all over the web for a solution to no avail (or I might not understand as I am fairly new to Python and scraping).

Thanks for your help.

Probably caused by incorrect console/environment settings. See: https://stackoverflow.com/a/35453687/1554386 — Alastair McCormack, Mar 19 '18 at 16:53

score 27 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 23 '12 at 07:32

27

I had the same problem. This may work for you:

print soup.prettify().encode('UTF-8')

answered Nov 23 '12 at 07:32

kmote

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@sliders_alpha: I believe it is because (in the case of the OP), BeautifuSoup guessed the encoding of the page incorrectly. See https://wiki.python.org/moin/UnicodeEncodeError – kmote Sep 09 '15 at 18:17
Had same problem with a Korean page. I wonder why beautiful soup doesn't use utf8 by default... The charset of the page is defined as utf8 too... – Shautieh Mar 01 '17 at 23:40
5 years later this solution got me unstuck too. :) – Juan Jimenez Oct 02 '17 at 15:59
without "encode('UTF-8')" did worked for me.. thumps up dear – vinrav Nov 14 '18 at 14:16

Jukka K. Korpela · Answer 2 · 2018-03-19T19:40:49.443

1

The page http://www.thesitewizard.com/faqs/copyright-symbol.shtml is sent without specifying character encoding. The page itself specifies the encoding as ISO-8859-1 in a meta tag, but only after the occurrence of the “©” character. So clients have to make a guess, and the guess may be wrong. If the client guesses UTF-8, then it will see the bit A9, which is a data error in UTF-8 data.

So it seems that you need to set the encoding (to ISO-8859-1, or more safely to windows-1252) when reading the data. This is of course an ad hoc solution only; it makes no sense to fix the encoding in general.

edited Mar 19 '18 at 19:40

answered Jul 12 '12 at 17:53

Jukka K. Korpela

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Yes, we’re talking about “©”; I’ve fixed this in my answer. – Jukka K. Korpela Mar 19 '18 at 19:40

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 12 '12 at 17:57

0

You're using chr(), which is wrong here because it expects ASCII and that goes only as far as 127/0x7F only (despite to popular folklore, ASCII is 7-bit only). 0xA9 / © is Unicode, so you should use unichr(169) instead.

answered Jul 12 '12 at 17:57

dda

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jul 13 '12 at 13:58

0

Just changing to unichr in the formatter function didn't work. Ended up using decode(formatter=blah) which did return unformatted html without the copyright symbol. Saved that html and fed that into prettify which did the trick.

answered Jul 13 '12 at 13:58

user1521411

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BeautifulSoup Prettify fails on copyright symbol

4 Answers4