AttributeError: 'xml.etree.ElementTree.Element' object has no attribute 'encode'

Question

I'm trying to make a desktop notifier, and for that I'm scraping news from a site. When I run the program, I get the following error.

news[child.tag] = child.encode('utf8')
AttributeError: 'xml.etree.ElementTree.Element' object has no attribute 'encode'

How do I resolve it? I'm completely new to this. I tried searching for solutions, but none of them worked for me.

Here is my code:

import requests
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET


# url of news rss feed
RSS_FEED_URL = "http://www.hindustantimes.com/rss/topnews/rssfeed.xml"


def loadRSS():
    '''
    utility function to load RSS feed
    '''
    # create HTTP request response object
    resp = requests.get(RSS_FEED_URL)
    # return response content
    return resp.content


def parseXML(rss):
    '''
    utility function to parse XML format rss feed
    '''
    # create element tree root object
    root = ET.fromstring(rss)
    # create empty list for news items
    newsitems = []
    # iterate news items
    for item in root.findall('./channel/item'):
        news = {}
        # iterate child elements of item
        for child in item:
            # special checking for namespace object content:media
            if child.tag == '{http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/}content':
                news['media'] = child.attrib['url']
            else:
                news[child.tag] = child.encode('utf8')
        newsitems.append(news)
    # return news items list
    return newsitems


def topStories():
    '''
    main function to generate and return news items
    '''
    # load rss feed
    rss = loadRSS()
    # parse XML
    newsitems = parseXML(rss)
    return newsitems

Answer 1

You're trying to convert a str to bytes, and then store those bytes in a dictionary. The problem is that the object you're doing this to is an xml.etree.ElementTree.Element, not a str.

You probably meant to get the text from within or around that element, and then encode() that. The docs suggests using the itertext() method:

''.join(child.itertext())

This will evaluate to a str, which you can then encode().

Note that the text and tail attributes might not contain text (emphasis added):

Their values are usually strings but may be any application-specific object.

If you want to use those attributes, you'll have to handle None or non-string values:

head = '' if child.text is None else str(child.text)
tail = '' if child.text is None else str(child.text)
# Do something with head and tail...

Even this is not really enough. If text or tail contain bytes objects of some unexpected (or plain wrong) encoding, this will raise a UnicodeEncodeError.

Strings versus Bytes

I suggest leaving the text as a str, and not encoding it at all. Encoding text to a bytes object is intended as the last step before writing it to a binary file, a network socket, or some other hardware.

For more on the difference between bytes and characters, see Ned Batchelder's "Pragmatic Unicode, or, How Do I Stop the Pain?" (36 minute video from PyCon US 2012). He covers both Python 2 and 3.

Example Output

Using the child.itertext() method, and not encoding the strings, I got a reasonable-looking list-of-dictionaries from topStories():

[
  ...,
  {'description': 'Ayushmann Khurrana says his five-year Bollywood journey has '
                  'been “a fun ride”; adds success is a lousy teacher while '
                  'failure is “your friend, philosopher and guide”.',
    'guid': 'http://www.hindustantimes.com/bollywood/i-am-a-hardcore-realist-and-that-s-why-i-feel-my-journey-has-been-a-joyride-ayushmann-khurrana/story-KQDR7gMuvhD9AeQTA7tbmI.html',
    'link': 'http://www.hindustantimes.com/bollywood/i-am-a-hardcore-realist-and-that-s-why-i-feel-my-journey-has-been-a-joyride-ayushmann-khurrana/story-KQDR7gMuvhD9AeQTA7tbmI.html',
    'media': 'http://www.hindustantimes.com/rf/image_size_630x354/HT/p2/2017/06/26/Pictures/actor-ayushman-khurana_24f064ae-5a5d-11e7-9d38-39c470df081e.JPG',
    'pubDate': 'Mon, 26 Jun 2017 10:50:26 GMT ',
    'title': "I am a hardcore realist, and that's why I feel my journey "
             'has been a joyride: Ayushmann...'},
]