[Python-Dev] teaching the new urllib

[Bill Janssen]

İsmail Dönmez <ismail at namtrac.org> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 21:56, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> > Probably the biggest issue will be having to explain string encoding.
> > Obviously you can gloss over it or provide students with a simple
> > library that just automatically converts the strings. Or even better,
> > provide some code for the standard library that can take the HTML,
> > figure out the encoding, and then return the decoded strings (might
> > actually already be something for that that I am not aware of).
> 
> http://chardet.feedparser.org/ should work fine for most auto-encoding
> detection needs.

Remember that the return value from urlopen() need not be HTML or XML.
It could be, say, an image or PDF or Word, or pretty much anything.

Bill