Utilizing Python3, BeautifulSoup and very minimal regex, I'm trying to scrape the text off of this webpage:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=2921
I have already succesfully extracted its html into a file. In fact I've done this with almost all of the presidential speeches available on this website; I have 247 (out of 258 possible) speeches' html saved locally on my computer.
My code for extracting just the text off of each page looks like this:
import re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
with open('scan_here.txt') as reference: #'scan_here.txt' is a file containing all the pages whose html I have downloaded successfully
for line in reference:
line_unclean = reference.readline() #each file's name is just a random string of 5-6 integers
line = str(re.sub(r'\n', '', line_unclean)) #for removing '\n' from each file name
f = open(('local_path_to_folder_containing_all_the_html_files\\') + line)
doc = f.read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(doc, 'html.parser')
for speech in soup.select('span.display-text'):
final_speech = str(speech)
print(final_speech)
Utilizing this code, I get the following error message:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "extract_individual_speeches.py", line 11, in <module>
doc = f.read()
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/codecs.py", line 319, in decode
(result, consumed) = self._buffer_decode(data, self.errors, final)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x97 in position 56443: invalid start byte
I understand this is a decode error and have tried to run this code on other html files, not just the first one which appears on the list of file names in 'scan_text.txt'. Same error, so I think it's an encoding issue local to the html files.
I think the problem might lie with this third line of the html, which has the same encoding for all my html files:
<html>
<head>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=windows-1251">
What is 'windows-1251?' I assume it's the problem here. I've looked it up and seen there are some windows-1251 to UTF-8 converters, but I didn't see one which works well with Python.
I found this SO thread which seems to deal with this issue of conversion, but I'm not sure how to integrate it with my existing code.
Any help on this issue is much appreciated, TIA.
'windows-1251' is a standard Windows encoding. What you need is UTF-8. You can define an encoding when you open a file.
Try something like this:
with open(file,'r',encoding='windows-1251') as f:
text = f.read()
or:
text = text.decode('windows-1251')
You can also use codecs:
import codecs
f = codecs.open(file,'r','windows-1251').read()
codecs.open(file,'w','UTF-8').write(f)
Related
import csv
with open('thefile.csv', 'rb') as f:
data = list(csv.reader(f))
import collections
counter = collections.defaultdict(int)
for row in data:
counter[row[10]] += 1
with open('/pythonwork/thefile_subset11.csv', 'w') as outfile:
writer = csv.writer(outfile)
for row in data:
if counter[row[10]] >= 504:
writer.writerow(row)
This code reads thefile.csv, makes changes, and writes results to thefile_subset1.
However, when I open the resulting csv in Microsoft Excel, there is an extra blank line after each record!
Is there a way to make it not put an extra blank line?
The csv.writer module directly controls line endings and writes \r\n into the file directly. In Python 3 the file must be opened in untranslated text mode with the parameters 'w', newline='' (empty string) or it will write \r\r\n on Windows, where the default text mode will translate each \n into \r\n.
#!python3
with open('/pythonwork/thefile_subset11.csv', 'w', newline='') as outfile:
writer = csv.writer(outfile)
In Python 2, use binary mode to open outfile with mode 'wb' instead of 'w' to prevent Windows newline translation. Python 2 also has problems with Unicode and requires other workarounds to write non-ASCII text. See the Python 2 link below and the UnicodeReader and UnicodeWriter examples at the end of the page if you have to deal with writing Unicode strings to CSVs on Python 2, or look into the 3rd party unicodecsv module:
#!python2
with open('/pythonwork/thefile_subset11.csv', 'wb') as outfile:
writer = csv.writer(outfile)
Documentation Links
https://docs.python.org/3/library/csv.html#csv.writer
https://docs.python.org/2/library/csv.html#csv.writer
Opening the file in binary mode "wb" will not work in Python 3+. Or rather, you'd have to convert your data to binary before writing it. That's just a hassle.
Instead, you should keep it in text mode, but override the newline as empty. Like so:
with open('/pythonwork/thefile_subset11.csv', 'w', newline='') as outfile:
Note: It seems this is not the preferred solution because of how the extra line was being added on a Windows system. As stated in the python document:
If csvfile is a file object, it must be opened with the ‘b’ flag on platforms where that makes a difference.
Windows is one such platform where that makes a difference. While changing the line terminator as I described below may have fixed the problem, the problem could be avoided altogether by opening the file in binary mode. One might say this solution is more "elegent". "Fiddling" with the line terminator would have likely resulted in unportable code between systems in this case, where opening a file in binary mode on a unix system results in no effect. ie. it results in cross system compatible code.
From Python Docs:
On Windows, 'b' appended to the mode
opens the file in binary mode, so
there are also modes like 'rb', 'wb',
and 'r+b'. Python on Windows makes a
distinction between text and binary
files; the end-of-line characters in
text files are automatically altered
slightly when data is read or written.
This behind-the-scenes modification to
file data is fine for ASCII text
files, but it’ll corrupt binary data
like that in JPEG or EXE files. Be
very careful to use binary mode when
reading and writing such files. On
Unix, it doesn’t hurt to append a 'b'
to the mode, so you can use it
platform-independently for all binary
files.
Original:
As part of optional paramaters for the csv.writer if you are getting extra blank lines you may have to change the lineterminator (info here). Example below adapated from the python page csv docs. Change it from '\n' to whatever it should be. As this is just a stab in the dark at the problem this may or may not work, but it's my best guess.
>>> import csv
>>> spamWriter = csv.writer(open('eggs.csv', 'w'), lineterminator='\n')
>>> spamWriter.writerow(['Spam'] * 5 + ['Baked Beans'])
>>> spamWriter.writerow(['Spam', 'Lovely Spam', 'Wonderful Spam'])
The simple answer is that csv files should always be opened in binary mode whether for input or output, as otherwise on Windows there are problems with the line ending. Specifically on output the csv module will write \r\n (the standard CSV row terminator) and then (in text mode) the runtime will replace the \n by \r\n (the Windows standard line terminator) giving a result of \r\r\n.
Fiddling with the lineterminator is NOT the solution.
A lot of the other answers have become out of date in the ten years since the original question. For Python3, the answer is right in the documentation:
If csvfile is a file object, it should be opened with newline=''
The footnote explains in more detail:
If newline='' is not specified, newlines embedded inside quoted fields will not be interpreted correctly, and on platforms that use \r\n linendings on write an extra \r will be added. It should always be safe to specify newline='', since the csv module does its own (universal) newline handling.
Use the method defined below to write data to the CSV file.
open('outputFile.csv', 'a',newline='')
Just add an additional newline='' parameter inside the open method :
def writePhoneSpecsToCSV():
rowData=["field1", "field2"]
with open('outputFile.csv', 'a',newline='') as csv_file:
writer = csv.writer(csv_file)
writer.writerow(rowData)
This will write CSV rows without creating additional rows!
I'm writing this answer w.r.t. to python 3, as I've initially got the same problem.
I was supposed to get data from arduino using PySerial, and write them in a .csv file. Each reading in my case ended with '\r\n', so newline was always separating each line.
In my case, newline='' option didn't work. Because it showed some error like :
with open('op.csv', 'a',newline=' ') as csv_file:
ValueError: illegal newline value: ''
So it seemed that they don't accept omission of newline here.
Seeing one of the answers here only, I mentioned line terminator in the writer object, like,
writer = csv.writer(csv_file, delimiter=' ',lineterminator='\r')
and that worked for me for skipping the extra newlines.
with open(destPath+'\\'+csvXML, 'a+') as csvFile:
writer = csv.writer(csvFile, delimiter=';', lineterminator='\r')
writer.writerows(xmlList)
The "lineterminator='\r'" permit to pass to next row, without empty row between two.
Borrowing from this answer, it seems like the cleanest solution is to use io.TextIOWrapper. I managed to solve this problem for myself as follows:
from io import TextIOWrapper
...
with open(filename, 'wb') as csvfile, TextIOWrapper(csvfile, encoding='utf-8', newline='') as wrapper:
csvwriter = csv.writer(wrapper)
for data_row in data:
csvwriter.writerow(data_row)
The above answer is not compatible with Python 2. To have compatibility, I suppose one would simply need to wrap all the writing logic in an if block:
if sys.version_info < (3,):
# Python 2 way of handling CSVs
else:
# The above logic
I used writerow
def write_csv(writer, var1, var2, var3, var4):
"""
write four variables into a csv file
"""
writer.writerow([var1, var2, var3, var4])
numbers=set([1,2,3,4,5,6,7,2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16])
rules = list(permutations(numbers, 4))
#print(rules)
selection=[]
with open("count.csv", 'w',newline='') as csvfile:
writer = csv.writer(csvfile)
for rule in rules:
number1,number2,number3,number4=rule
if ((number1+number2+number3+number4)%5==0):
#print(rule)
selection.append(rule)
write_csv(writer,number1,number2,number3,number4)
When using Python 3 the empty lines can be avoid by using the codecs module. As stated in the documentation, files are opened in binary mode so no change of the newline kwarg is necessary. I was running into the same issue recently and that worked for me:
with codecs.open( csv_file, mode='w', encoding='utf-8') as out_csv:
csv_out_file = csv.DictWriter(out_csv)
EDIT: Now that the problem is solved, I realize that it had more to do with properly reading/writing byte-strings, rather than HTML. Hopefully, that will make it easier for someone else to find this answer.
I have an HTML file that's poorly formatted. I want to use a Python lib to just make it tidy.
It seems like it should be as simple as the following:
import sys
from lxml import etree, html
#read the unformatted HTML
with open('C:/Users/mhurley/Portable_Python/notebooks/View_Custom_Report.html', 'r', encoding='utf-8') as file:
#write the pretty XML to a file
file_text = ''.join(file.readlines())
#format the HTML
document_root = html.fromstring(file_text)
document = etree.tostring(document_root, pretty_print=True)
#write the nice, pretty, formatted HTML
with open('C:/Users/mhurley/Portable_Python/notebooks/Pretty.html', 'w') as file:
#write the pretty XML to a file
file.write(document)
But this chunk of code complains that file_lines is not a string or bytes-like object. Okay, it makes sense that the function can't take a list, I suppose.
But then, it's 'bytes' not a string. No problem, str(document)
But then I get HTML that's full of '\n' that are not newlines... they're a slash followed by an en. And there are no actual carriage returns in the result, it's just one long line.
I've tried a number of other weird things like specifying the encoding, trying to decode, etc. None of which produce the desired result.
What's the right way to read and write this kind of (is non-ASCII the right term?) text?
You are missing that you get bytes from tostring method from etree and need to take that into account when writing (a bytestring) to a file. Use the b switch in the open function like this and forget about the str() conversion:
with open('Pretty.html', 'wb') as file:
#write the pretty XML to a file
file.write(document)
Addendum
Even though this answer solves the immediate problem at hand and teaches about bytestrings, the solution by Padraic Cunningham is the cleaner and faster way to write lxml etrees to a file.
This can be done all using lxml in a couple of lines of code without ever needing to use open, the .write method is exactly for what you are trying to do:
# parse using file name which is the also the recommended way.
tree = html.parse("C:/Users/mhurley/Portable_Python/notebooks/View_Custom_Report.html")
# call write on the tree
tree.write("C:/Users/mhurley/Portable_Python/notebooks/Pretty.html", pretty_print=True, encoding="utf=8")
Also file_text = ''.join(file.readlines()) is exactly the same as file_text = file.read()
I am trying to read twitter data from json file using python 2.7.12.
Code I used is such:
import json
import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')
def get_tweets_from_file(file_name):
tweets = []
with open(file_name, 'rw') as twitter_file:
for line in twitter_file:
if line != '\r\n':
line = line.encode('ascii', 'ignore')
tweet = json.loads(line)
if u'info' not in tweet.keys():
tweets.append(tweet)
return tweets
Result I got:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "twitter_project.py", line 100, in <module>
main()
File "twitter_project.py", line 95, in main
tweets = get_tweets_from_dir(src_dir, dest_dir)
File "twitter_project.py", line 59, in get_tweets_from_dir
new_tweets = get_tweets_from_file(file_name)
File "twitter_project.py", line 71, in get_tweets_from_file
line = line.encode('ascii', 'ignore')
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x80 in position 3131: invalid start byte
I went through all the answers from similar issues and came up with this code and it worked last time. I have no clue why it isn't working now.
In my case(mac os), there was .DS_store file in my data folder which was a hidden and auto generated file and it caused the issue. I was able to fix the problem after removing it.
It doesn't help that you have sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8'), which is confusing things further - It's a nasty hack and you need to remove it from your code.
See https://stackoverflow.com/a/34378962/1554386 for more information
The error is happening because line is a string and you're calling encode(). encode() only makes sense if the string is a Unicode, so Python tries to convert it Unicode first using the default encoding, which in your case is UTF-8, but should be ASCII. Either way, 0x80 is not valid ASCII or UTF-8 so fails.
0x80 is valid in some characters sets. In windows-1252/cp1252 it's €.
The trick here is to understand the encoding of your data all the way through your code. At the moment, you're leaving too much up to chance. Unicode String types are a handy Python feature that allows you to decode encoded Strings and forget about the encoding until you need to write or transmit the data.
Use the io module to open the file in text mode and decode the file as it goes - no more .decode()! You need to make sure the encoding of your incoming data is consistent. You can either re-encode it externally or change the encoding in your script. Here's I've set the encoding to windows-1252.
with io.open(file_name, 'r', encoding='windows-1252') as twitter_file:
for line in twitter_file:
# line is now a <type 'unicode'>
tweet = json.loads(line)
The io module also provide Universal Newlines. This means \r\n are detected as newlines, so you don't have to watch for them.
For others who come across this question due to the error message, I ran into this error trying to open a pickle file when I opened the file in text mode instead of binary mode.
This was the original code:
import pickle as pkl
with open(pkl_path, 'r') as f:
obj = pkl.load(f)
And this fixed the error:
import pickle as pkl
with open(pkl_path, 'rb') as f:
obj = pkl.load(f)
I got a similar error by accidentally trying to read a parquet file as a csv
pd.read_csv(file.parquet)
pd.read_parquet(file.parquet)
The error occurs when you are trying to read a tweet containing sentence like
"#Mike http:\www.google.com \A8&^)((&() how are&^%()( you ". Which cannot be read as a String instead you are suppose to read it as raw String .
but Converting to raw String Still gives error so i better i suggest you to
read a json file something like this:
import codecs
import json
with codecs.open('tweetfile','rU','utf-8') as f:
for line in f:
data=json.loads(line)
print data["tweet"]
keys.append(data["id"])
fulldata.append(data["tweet"])
which will get you the data load from json file .
You can also write it to a csv using Pandas.
import pandas as pd
output = pd.DataFrame( data={ "tweet":fulldata,"id":keys} )
output.to_csv( "tweets.csv", index=False, quoting=1 )
Then read from csv to avoid the encoding and decoding problem
hope this will help you solving you problem.
Midhun
I'm extracting a certain part of a HTML document (to be fair: basis for this is an iXBRL document which means I do have a lot of written formatting code inside) and write my output, the original file without the extracted part, to a .txt file. My aim is to measure the difference in document size (how much KB of the original document refers to the extracted part). As far as I know there shouldn't be any difference in HTML to text format, so my difference should be reliable although I am comparing two different document formats. My code so far is:
import glob
import os
import contextlib
import re
#contextlib.contextmanager
def stdout2file(fname):
import sys
f = open(fname, 'w')
sys.stdout = f
yield
sys.stdout = sys.__stdout__
f.close()
def extractor():
os.chdir(r"F:\Test")
with stdout2file("FileShortened.txt"):
for file in glob.iglob('*.html', recursive=True):
with open(file) as f:
contents = f.read()
extract = re.compile(r'(This is the beginning of).*?Until the End', re.I | re.S)
cut = extract.sub('', contents)
print(file.split(os.path.sep)[-1], end="| ")
print(cut, end="\n")
extractor()
Note: I am NOT using BS4 or lxml because I am not only interested in HTML text but actually in ALL lines between my start and end-RegEx incl. all formatting code lines.
My code is working without problems, however as I have a lot of files my FileShortened.txt document is quickly going to be massive in size. My problem is not with the file or the extraction, but with redirecting my output to various txt-file. For now, I am getting everything into one file, what I would need is some kind of a "for each file searched, create new txt-file with the same name as the original document" condition (arcpy module?!)?
Somehting like:
File1.html --> File1Short.txt
File2.html --> File2Short.txt
...
Is there an easy way (without changing my code too much) to invert my code in the sense of printing the "RegEx Match" to a new .txt file instead of "everything except my RegEx match"?
Any help appreciated!
Ok, I figured it out.
Final Code is:
import glob
import os
import re
from os import path
def extractor():
os.chdir(r"F:\Test") # the directory containing my html
for file in glob.glob("*.html"): # iterates over all files in the directory ending in .html
with open(file) as f, open((file.rsplit(".", 1)[0]) + ".txt", "w") as out:
contents = f.read()
extract = re.compile(r'Start.*?End', re.I | re.S)
cut = extract.sub('', contents)
out.write(cut)
out.close()
extractor()
I have a CSV file and I wish to understand its encoding. Is there a menu option in Microsoft Excel that can help me detect it
OR do I need to make use of programming languages like C# or PHP to deduce it.
You can use Notepad++ to evaluate a file's encoding without needing to write code. The evaluated encoding of the open file will display on the bottom bar, far right side. The encodings supported can be seen by going to Settings -> Preferences -> New Document/Default Directory and looking in the drop down.
In Linux systems, you can use file command. It will give the correct encoding
Sample:
file blah.csv
Output:
blah.csv: ISO-8859 text, with very long lines
If you use Python, just use a print() function to check the encoding of a csv file. For example:
with open('file_name.csv') as f:
print(f)
The output is something like this:
<_io.TextIOWrapper name='file_name.csv' mode='r' encoding='utf8'>
You can also use python chardet library
# install the chardet library
!pip install chardet
# import the chardet library
import chardet
# use the detect method to find the encoding
# 'rb' means read in the file as binary
with open("test.csv", 'rb') as file:
print(chardet.detect(file.read()))
Use chardet https://github.com/chardet/chardet （documentation is short and easy to read).
Install python, then pip install chardet, at last use the command line command.
I tested under GB2312 and it's pretty accurate. (Make sure you have at least a few characters, sample with only 1 character may fail easily).
file is not reliable as you can see.
Or you can execute in python console or in Jupyter Notebook:
import csv
data = open("file.csv","r")
data
You will see information about the data object like this:
<_io.TextIOWrapper name='arch.csv' mode='r' encoding='cp1250'>
As you can see it contains encoding infotmation.
CSV files have no headers indicating the encoding.
You can only guess by looking at:
the platform / application the file was created on
the bytes in the file
In 2021, emoticons are widely used, but many import tools fail to import them. The chardet library is often recommended in the answers above, but the lib does not handle emoticons well.
icecream = '🍦'
import csv
with open('test.csv', 'w') as f:
wf = csv.writer(f)
wf.writerow(['ice cream', icecream])
import chardet
with open('test.csv', 'rb') as f:
print(chardet.detect(f.read()))
{'encoding': 'Windows-1254', 'confidence': 0.3864823918622268, 'language': 'Turkish'}
This gives UnicodeDecodeError while trying to read the file with this encoding.
The default encoding on Mac is UTF-8. It's included explicitly here but that wasn't even necessary... but on Windows it might be.
with open('test.csv', 'r', encoding='utf-8') as f:
print(f.read())
ice cream,🍦
The file command also picked this up
file test.csv
test.csv: UTF-8 Unicode text, with CRLF line terminators
My advice in 2021, if the automatic detection goes wrong: try UTF-8 before resorting to chardet.
In Python, You can Try...
from encodings.aliases import aliases
alias_values = set(aliases.values())
for encoding in set(aliases.values()):
try:
df=pd.read_csv("test.csv", encoding=encoding)
print('successful', encoding)
except:
pass
As it is mentioned by #3724913 (Jitender Kumar) to use file command (it also works in WSL on Windows), I was able to get encoding information of a csv file by executing file --exclude encoding blah.csv using info available on man file as file blah.csv won't show the encoding info on my system.
import pandas as pd
import chardet
def read_csv(path: str, size: float = 0.10) -> pd.DataFrame:
"""
Reads a CSV file located at path and returns it as a Pandas DataFrame. If
nrows is provided, only the first nrows rows of the CSV file will be
read. Otherwise, all rows will be read.
Args:
path (str): The path to the CSV file.
size (float): The fraction of the file to be used for detecting the
encoding. Defaults to 0.10.
Returns:
pd.DataFrame: The CSV file as a Pandas DataFrame.
Raises:
UnicodeError: If the encoding of the file cannot be detected with the
initial size, the function will retry with a larger size (increased by
0.20) until the encoding can be detected or an error is raised.
"""
try:
byte_size = int(os.path.getsize(path) * size)
with open(path, "rb") as rawdata:
result = chardet.detect(rawdata.read(byte_size))
return pd.read_csv(path, encoding=result["encoding"])
except UnicodeError:
return read_csv(path=path, size=size + 0.20)
Hi, I just added a function to find the correct encoding and read the csv in the given file path. Thought it would be useful
Just add the encoding argument that matches the file you`re trying to upload.
open('example.csv', encoding='UTF8')