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.

Answer 1

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

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

Answer 2

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.