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Why urllib returns garbage from some wikipedia articles?

Tags:

python

urllib2

>>> import urllib2

>>> good_article = 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia'
>>> bad_article = 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India'

>>> req1 = urllib2.Request(good_article)
>>> req2 = urllib2.Request(bad_article)
>>> req1.add_header('User-Agent', 'Mozilla/5.0')
>>> req2.add_header('User-Agent', 'Mozilla/5.0')
>>> result1 = urllib2.urlopen(req1)
>>> result2 = urllib2.urlopen(req2)

>>> result1.readline()
'<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">\n'
>>> result2.readline()
'\x1f\x8b\x08\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x03\xec\xfdi\x8f$I\x96\x18\x08~\xee\xfe\x15BO\x06+\x82\xeefn\xa7\x9b[D\x855<<\x8e\x8c\xcc8\x9c\xe1\x9e\x99l6{\x15bf\xeaf\x1a\xae\xa6j\xa5\x87{x\x12\x1cT-\xb0 \xb1\xc0\x00\x0b4\x81\x01wg?\x10S\xe4\xee\x92\x98\x9d\x9ec\x01\x12\x8b]\x02\xdd5\x1f8\x1c\xf07\xd4\xd4\x1f\xd8\xbf\xb0\xef\x10\x11\x155\x15\xb5\xc3#\xb2"\xbaf\xea\x087\x95KEE\x9e<y\xf7\xfb\xf9\xdfz\xfa\xf6\xf4\xe2O\xcf\x9e\x89y\xb6\x08\xc5\xd9wO^\xbd<\x15{\x8d\xc3\xc3\x1f\xba\xa7\x87\x87O/\x9e\x8a\xbf\xff\xf5\xc5\xebW\xa2\xddl\x89\x8bDFi\x90\x05q$\xc3\xc3\xc3go\xf6\xc4\xde<\xcb\x96\x0f\x0f\x0fonn\x9a7\xddf\x9c\xcc\x0e/\xde\x1d~\xc0\xb1\xda\xd8Y\xfdldV\xcf\xe64\x9b\xee\x8d\xfe\xf8\xe7\xf4\xc2PF\xb3\xc7{~\xb4\'\xa6A\xf2x/\xcc\x92=\xf1a\x11F\xe9c\xc7\xd0\xed\xe1p\xc8#R\x7f_N\xe1O\x16d\xa1?z\x19M\x03)\x1a\xe2\x87\xe0*X\xfa\xf0\xfb@ds_\\&\xbe/\xfchr;\tc*\xfe\xf9!\xb7\xff\xe3\x9f/\xfcL\n'

Seems that the reason is not in headers because I tried exactly the same headers as my browser sends and urllib2 still returns this garbage.

Most of the pages returned normally

like image 516
Mikhail M. Avatar asked Dec 29 '22 00:12

Mikhail M.


2 Answers

It's not an environment, locale, or encoding problem. The offending stream of bytes is gzip-compressed. The \x1f\x8B at the start is what you get at the start of a gzip stream with the default settings.

Looks as though the server is ignoring the fact that you didn't do

req2.add_header('Accept-encoding', 'gzip')

You should look at result.headers.getheader('Content-Encoding') and if necessary, decompress it yourself.

like image 92
John Machin Avatar answered Jan 08 '23 02:01

John Machin


I think there is something else causing you a problem. That series of bytes looks some encoded content.

import urllib2
bad_article = 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India'
req = urllib2.Request(bad_article)
req.add_header('User-Agent', 'Mozilla/5.0')
result = urllib2.urlopen(req)
print result.readline()

resulted in this

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

which is correct.

like image 41
Senthil Kumaran Avatar answered Jan 08 '23 01:01

Senthil Kumaran