How to handle response encoding from urllib.request.urlopen() , to avoid TypeError: can't use a string pattern on a bytes-like object

I'm trying to open a webpage using urllib.request.urlopen() then search it with regular expressions, but that gives the following error:

> TypeError: can't use a string pattern on a bytes-like object

I understand why, urllib.request.urlopen() returns a bytestream, so re doesn't know the encoding to use. What am I supposed to do in this situation? Is there a way to specify the encoding method in a urlrequest maybe or will I need to re-encode the string myself? If so what am I looking to do, I assume I should read the encoding from the header info or the encoding type if specified in the html and then re-encode it to that?

As for me, the solution is as following (python3):

resource = urllib.request.urlopen(an_url)
content =  resource.read().decode(resource.headers.get_content_charset())

You just need to decode the response, using the Content-Type header typically the last value. There is an example given in the tutorial too.

output = response.decode('utf-8')

I had the same issues for the last two days. I finally have a solution. I'm using the info() method of the object returned by urlopen():

req=urllib.request.urlopen(URL)
charset=req.info().get_content_charset()
content=req.read().decode(charset)

With requests:

import requests

response = requests.get(URL).text

Here is an example simple http request (that I tested and works)...

address = "http://stackoverflow.com"    
urllib.request.urlopen(address).read().decode('utf-8')

Make sure to read the documentation.

> https://docs.python.org/3/library/urllib.request.html

If you want to do something more detailed GET/POST REQUEST.

import urllib.request
# HTTP REQUEST of some address
def REQUEST(address):
    req = urllib.request.Request(address)
    req.add_header('User-Agent', 'NAME (Linux/MacOS; FROM, USA)')
    response = urllib.request.urlopen(req)
    html = response.read().decode('utf-8')  # make sure its all text not binary
    print("REQUEST (ONLINE): " + address)
    return html

urllib.urlopen(url).headers.getheader('Content-Type')

Will output something like this:

text/html; charset=utf-8

after you make a request req = urllib.request.urlopen(...) you have to read the request by calling html_string = req.read() that will give you the string response that you can then parse the way you want.