Check for string in "response.content" raising "TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str'"

Question

I am trying to see if a sentence is present in the response back from a request.

import requests

r = requests.get('https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/piers-test-16613670281')
text = 'Sorry, there are no upcoming events'

if text in r.content: 
   print('No Upcoming Events')

I am getting the following error:

TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str'

I am not quite sure why this occurring and what the solution would be.

Answer 1

r.content returns a bytes like object in Python 3.x. To check, do:

>>> type(r.content)
<class 'bytes'>

There are multiple ways to fix your issue. For example:

1. Decode r.content to string: You can decode it to string as:

   >>> text in r.content.decode()
   False
   

2. Convert r.content to utf-8 string as:

   >>> text in str(r.content, 'utf-8')
   False
   

3. Define your text to search as a byte-string. For example:

   text = b'Sorry, there are no upcoming events'
   #      ^  note the `b` here
   

   Now you may simply use it with r.content as:

   >>> text in r.content
   False
   

4. Use r.text instead of r.content to search for the string, which as the document suggests:

   The text encoding guessed by Requests is used when you access r.text.

   Hence you may just do:

   >>> text in r.text
   False
   

Answer 2

r.content is a bytes object but text is str, so you can't do the __contains__ (in) check on another directly.

You can easily (re-)define the text object to be a bytestring:

text = b'Sorry, there are no upcoming events'

Now, you can do if text in r.content:.

or you can use r.text to get the str representation directly, and use text as-is (as str).

Answer 3

Requests returns a bytes object, you need to convert it to a string before performing the in

Here's a reference about built in types, one of which is bytes https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html

the line of code you're looking for is something like,

if text in r.content.decode():
  print('No upcoming events')

by default decode assumes utf-8, you can pass in a different encoding if you need to though.