UnicodeEncodeError in Python 3 and BeautifulSoup4

Question

When running my codes, I get this error

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\u0303' in position 71: ordinal not in range(128)

This is my whole codes,

from urllib.request import urlopen as uReq
from urllib.request import urlretrieve as uRet
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as soup
import urllib

for x in range(143, 608):
    myUrl = "example.com/" + str(x)
    try:
        uClient = uReq(myUrl)
        page_html = uClient.read()
        uClient.close()
        page_soup = soup(page_html, "html.parser")

        container = page_soup.findAll("div", {"id": "videoPostContent"})

        img_container = container[0].findAll("img")
        images = img_container[0].findAll("img")

        imgCounter = 0

        if len(images) == "":
            for image in images:
                print('Downloading image from ' + image['src'] + '...')
                imgCounter += 1
                uRet(image['src'], 'pictures/' + str(x) + '.jpg')
        else:
            for image in img_container:
                print('Downloading image from ' + image['src'] + '...')
                imgCounter += 1
                uRet(image['src'], 'pictures/' + str(x) + '_' + str(imgCounter) + '.jpg')
    except urllib.error.HTTPError:
        continue

Tried Solutions:

I tried adding .encode/decode('utf-8') and .text.encode/decode('utf-8') to page_soup but it gives this errors.

AttributeError: 'str' / 'bytes' object has no attribute 'findAll' or

Converting page_soup into a string means that it no longer is a BeatifulSoup object. So you can't use findAll. What line is throwing the error? — TheF1rstPancake
So one of the strings in there isn't encoded in a way that uRet understands. I believe you want to encode any string before you put it in uRet. Likely images['src'].encode('utf-8'). — TheF1rstPancake
Tried putting .encode('utf-8) in images['src'] but it gives me: TypeError: cannot use a string pattern on a bytes-like object — Axis

snakecharmerb snakecharmerb · Accepted Answer · 2017-10-15T08:34:03

At least one of the image src urls contain non-ascii characters, and urlretrieve is unable to process them.

>>> url = 'http://example.com/' + '\u0303'
>>> urlretrieve(url)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  ...
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\u0303' in position 5: ordinal not in range(128)

You could try one of these approaches to get around this problem.

Assume that these urls are valid, and retrieve them using a library that has better unicode handling, like requests.
Assume that the urls are valid, but contain unicode characters that must be escaped before passing to urlretrieve. This would entail splitting the url into scheme, domain, path etc, quoting the path and any query parameters and then unsplitting; all the tools for this are in the urllib.parse package (but this is probably what requests does anyway, so just use requests).
Assume that these urls are broken and skip them by wrapping your urlretrieve calls with try/except UnicodeEncodeError

UnicodeEncodeError in Python 3 and BeautifulSoup4

1 Answers