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Start your free trialRajesh Tupakula
1,927 PointsNeed help with the regular expression.
when I use this below script it complains about the string pattern
import urllib.request
import re
from re import findall
page = urllib.request.urlopen('https://sonar.com/prod/drilldown/measures/1274530?metric=coverage')
data = page.read()
print(page.read())
html = page.read()
htmlStr = html.decode()
print(data)
print(re.findall(r'[coverag]{8}', data))
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Users\a530614\Documents\pythons\script.py", line 10, in <module>
print(re.findall(r'\b[coverag]\b', data))
File "C:\Users\a530614\python\lib\re.py", line 213, in findall
return _compile(pattern, flags).findall(string)
TypeError: cannot use a string pattern on a bytes-like object
but when use b type it works for me.
import urllib.request
import re
from re import findall
page = urllib.request.urlopen('https://sonar.com/prod/drilldown/measures/1274530?metric=coverage')
data = page.read()
print(page.read())
html = page.read()
htmlStr = html.decode()
print(data)
print(re.findall(b'[coverag]{8}', data))
What is that I am missing here ?
[MOD: added ``` markdown formatting -cf]
1 Answer
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,441 Pointsurllib.request.urlopen
returns an HTTPResonse
object. The .read()
method returns a bytes object. Looking at it interactively:
$ python3
Python 3.4.3 (default, Oct 14 2015, 20:28:29)
[GCC 4.8.4] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import urllib.request
# Get page
>>> page = urllib.request.urlopen('https://teamtreehouse.com/')
>>> type(page)
<class 'http.client.HTTPResponse'>
# Get data
>>> data = page.read()
>>> type(data)
<class 'bytes'>
A bytes
object is different from a string
object. Using re
on a bytes
object requires a bytes
regex. The "b" signifies that the string should be interpreted as bytes. You can also pair this with the "r" to signify a raw-bytes pattern.
# Using data from above
>>> import re
>>> re.findall(b'Treehouse', data)
[b'Treehouse', b'Treehouse', b'Treehouse', b'Treehouse', b'Treehouse', b'Treehouse']
# Try again with regular string will Fail
>>> re.findall('Treehouse', data)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/re.py", line 210, in findall
return _compile(pattern, flags).findall(string)
TypeError: can't use a string pattern on a bytes-like object
Post back if you have if you need more help.
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,441 PointsChris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,441 PointsWhy was this down voted? Was there an issue with this answer?