Encoding error while parsing RSS with lxml

Question

I want to parse downloaded RSS with lxml, but I don't know how to handle with UnicodeDecodeError?

request = urllib2.Request('http://wiadomosci.onet.pl/kraj/rss.xml')
response = urllib2.urlopen(request)
response = response.read()
encd = chardet.detect(response)['encoding']
parser = etree.XMLParser(ns_clean=True,recover=True,encoding=encd)
tree = etree.parse(response, parser)

But I get an error:

tree   = etree.parse(response, parser)
File "lxml.etree.pyx", line 2692, in lxml.etree.parse (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:49594)
  File "parser.pxi", line 1500, in lxml.etree._parseDocument (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:71364)
  File "parser.pxi", line 1529, in lxml.etree._parseDocumentFromURL (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:71647)
  File "parser.pxi", line 1429, in lxml.etree._parseDocFromFile (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:70742)
  File "parser.pxi", line 975, in lxml.etree._BaseParser._parseDocFromFile (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:67
740)
  File "parser.pxi", line 539, in lxml.etree._ParserContext._handleParseResultDoc (src/lxml/lxml.etr
ee.c:63824)
  File "parser.pxi", line 625, in lxml.etree._handleParseResult (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:64745)
  File "parser.pxi", line 559, in lxml.etree._raiseParseError (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:64027)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc5 in position 97: ordinal not in range(128)

Answer 1

I ran into a similar problem, and it turns out this has NOTHING to do with encodings. What's happening is this - lxml is throwing you a totally unrelated error. In this case, the error is that the .parse function expects a filename or URL, and not a string with the contents itself. However, when it tries to print out the error, it chokes on non-ascii characters and shows that completely confusing error message. It is highly unfortunate and other people have commented on this issue here:

https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/pipermail/lxml/2009-February/004393.html

Luckily, yours is a very easy fix. Just replace .parse with .fromstring and you should be totally good to go:

request = urllib2.Request('http://wiadomosci.onet.pl/kraj/rss.xml')
response = urllib2.urlopen(request)
response = response.read()
encd = chardet.detect(response)['encoding']
parser = etree.XMLParser(ns_clean=True,recover=True,encoding=encd)

## lxml Y U NO MAKE SENSE!!!
tree = etree.fromstring(response, parser)

Just tested this on my machine and it worked fine. Hope it helps!