Python3 html and lxml parser encoding problem

Question

When parsing some HTML using BeautifulSoup or PyQuery, they will use a parser like lxml or html5lib. Let's say I've a file containing the following

<span>  é    and    ’  </span>

In my environnement they seems incorrectly encoded, using PyQuery:

>>> doc = pq(filename=PATH, parser="xml")
>>> doc.text()
'Ã© and â\u20ac\u2122'
>>> doc = pq(filename=PATH, parser="html")
>>> doc.text()
'Ã\x83Â© and Ã¢â\x82¬â\x84¢'
>>> doc = pq(filename=PATH, parser="soup")
>>> doc.text()
'Ã© and â\u20ac\u2122'
>>> doc = pq(filename=PATH, parser="html5")
>>> doc.text()
'Ã© and â\u20ac\u2122'

Beyond the fact that the encoding seems incorrect, one of the main problem is that doc.text() returns an instance of str instead of bytes which isn't a normal thing according to that question I asked yesterday.

Also, passing the argument encoding='utf-8' to PyQuery seems useless, I tried 'latin1' nothing change. I also tried to add some meta data because I read that lxml read them to figure out what encoding to use but it doesn't change anything:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="fr" dir="ltr">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=latin1"/>
<span>  é    and    ’  </span>
</head>
</html>

If I use lxml directly it seems a bit different

>>> from lxml import etree
>>> tree = etree.parse(PATH)
>>> tree.docinfo.encoding
'UTF-8'

>>> result = etree.tostring(tree.getroot(), pretty_print=False)
>>> result
b'<span>  &#233;    and    &#8217;  </span>'

>>> import html
>>> html.unescape(result.decode('utf-8'))
'<span>  é    and    \u2019  </span>\n'

Erf, It drives me a bit crazy, your help would be appreciated

I think the problem is in the filename=PATH, beacuse when i run from pyquery import PyQuery as pq \n html = '<span> é and ’ </span>' \n doc = pq(html, parser='html') \n print(doc.text()), it returns "é and '" — Louis Vetter
– Louis Vetter, Commented Sep 1, 2018 at 11:49

snoob dogg · Accepted Answer · 2018-09-01 14:20:50Z

I think I figured it out. It seems that, even BeautifulSoup or PyQuery enable to do it, it is a bad idea to open directly a file containing some special UTF-8 chars. Especially, what confused me the most is that '’' symbol which seems not handled correctly by my Windows Terminal. So, the solution is to pre-process the file before parsing it:

def pre_process_html_content(html_content, encoding=None):
    """Pre process bytes coming from file or request."""
    if not isinstance(html_content, bytes):
        raise TypeError("html_content must a bytes not a " + str(type(html_content)))

    html_content = html_content.decode(encoding)


    # Handle weird symbols here
    html_content = html_content.replace('\u2019', "'")

    return html_content


def sanitize_html_file(path, encoding=None):
    with open(path, 'rb') as f:
        content = f.read()
    encoding = encoding or 'utf-8'

    return pre_process_html_content(content, encoding)


def open_pq(path, parser=None, encoding=None):
    """Macro for open HTML file with PyQuery."""
    content = sanitize_html_file(path, encoding)
    parser = parser or 'xml'

    return pq(content, parser=parser)


doc = open_pq(PATH)

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