I am trying to see if a sentence is present in the response back from a request.
import requests
r = requests.get('https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/piers-test-16613670281')
text = 'Sorry, there are no upcoming events'
if text in r.content:
print('No Upcoming Events')
I am getting the following error:
TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str'
I am not quite sure why this occurring and what the solution would be.
r.content is a bytes object but text is str, so you can't do the __contains__ (in) check on another directly.
You can easily (re-)define the text object to be a bytestring:
text = b'Sorry, there are no upcoming events'
Now, you can do if text in r.content:.
or you can use r.text to get the str representation directly, and use text as-is (as str).
r.content returns a bytes like object in Python 3.x. To check, do:
>>> type(r.content)
<class 'bytes'>
There are multiple ways to fix your issue. For example:
Decode r.content to string: You can decode it to string as:
>>> text in r.content.decode()
False
Convert r.content to utf-8 string as:
>>> text in str(r.content, 'utf-8')
False
Define your text to search as a byte-string. For example:
text = b'Sorry, there are no upcoming events'
# ^ note the `b` here
Now you may simply use it with r.content as:
>>> text in r.content
False
Use r.text instead of r.content to search for the string, which as the document suggests:
The text encoding guessed by Requests is used when you access
r.text.
Hence you may just do:
>>> text in r.text
False
Requests returns a bytes object, you need to convert it to a string before performing the in
Here's a reference about built in types, one of which is bytes https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html
the line of code you're looking for is something like,
if text in r.content.decode():
print('No upcoming events')
by default decode assumes utf-8, you can pass in a different encoding if you need to though.