TypeError: compile() expected string without null bytes

Question

I am trying to translate a string using google translate API.

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-


import sys
import urllib
import urllib2

import ast


url = 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/language/translate?v=1.0&q='+urllib.quote(' '.join(sys.argv[3:]))                   +'&langpair='+sys.argv[1]+'%7C'+sys.argv[2] 
print url

transtext =urllib2.urlopen(urllib2.Request(url)).read()
content=ast.literal_eval(transtext)

print  content['responseData']['translatedText']

python testURL.py hi en 'नमस्ते'

this is the url given .

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/language/translate?v=1.0&q=%E0%A4%A8%E0%A4%AE%E0%A4%B8%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%A4%E0%A5%87&langpair=hi%7Cen If we check the above url we can see the Output is Hello

{"responseData": {"translatedText":"Hello"}, "responseDetails": null, "responseStatus": 200}

this is in string format so im trying to convert it to dictionary format using ast.literal_eval and then acess the data in dictionary by content['responseData']['translatedText'] but following error occurs

Error:

    content=ast.literal_eval(transtext)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/ast.py", line 49, in literal_eval
    node_or_string = parse(node_or_string, mode='eval')
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/ast.py", line 37, in parse
    return compile(expr, filename, mode, PyCF_ONLY_AST)
TypeError: compile() expected string without null bytes

python version 2.6 and OS Ubuntu 9.10

Answer 1

The response you get are likely in JSON format. Try using the json module, which is included with Python 2.6.

Answer 2

literal_eval expects Python representations, which don't include null. It's JSON, so use json.loads(transtext)