When I printed response.read() I noticed that b was preprended to the string (e.g. b'{“a”:1,..). The “b” stands for bytes and serves as a declaration for the type of the object you’re handling. Since, I knew that a string could be converted to a dict by using json.loads(‘string’), I just had to convert the byte … Read more
Strictly speaking URIs can’t contain non-ASCII characters; what you have there is an IRI. To convert an IRI to a plain ASCII URI: non-ASCII characters in the hostname part of the address have to be encoded using the Punycode-based IDNA algorithm; non-ASCII characters in the path, and most of the other parts of the address … Read more
According to this, you have to use the following: import urllib.request The reason is: With packages, like this, you sometimes need to explicitly import the piece you want. That way, the urllib module doesn’t have to load everything up just because you wanted one small part.
You can use HEAD request instead of GET. It will only download the header, but not the content. Then you can check the response status from the headers. For python 2.7.x, you can use httplib: import httplib c = httplib.HTTPConnection(‘www.example.com’) c.request(“HEAD”, ”) if c.getresponse().status == 200: print(‘web site exists’) or urllib2: import urllib2 try: urllib2.urlopen(‘http://www.example.com/some_page’) … Read more
Python’s wonderful standard library to the rescue… import codecs reader = codecs.getreader(“utf-8”) obj = json.load(reader(response)) Works with both py2 and py3. Docs: Python 2, Python3