Get content-type from HTML page with BeautifulSoup

Question

I am trying to get the character encoding for pages that I scrape, but in some cases it is failing. Here is what I am doing:

resp = urllib2.urlopen(request)
self.COOKIE_JAR.extract_cookies(resp, request)
content = resp.read()
encodeType= resp.headers.getparam('charset')
resp.close()

That is my first attempt. But if charset comes back as type None, I do this:

soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
if encodeType == None:
    try:
        encodeType = soup.findAll('meta', {'http-equiv':lambda v:v.lower()=='content-type'})
    except AttributeError, e:
        print e
        try:
            encodeType = soup.findAll('meta', {'charset':lambda v:v.lower() != None})
        except AttributeError, e:
            print e
            if encodeType == '':
                encodeType = 'iso-8859-1'

The page I am testing has this in the header: <meta charset="ISO-8859-1">

I would expect the first try statement to return an empty string, but I get this error on both try statements (which is why the 2nd statement is nested for now):

'NoneType' object has no attribute 'lower'

What is wrong with the 2nd try statement? I am guessing the 1st one is incorrect as well, since it's throwing an error and not just coming back blank.

OR better yet is there a more elegant way to just remove any special character encoding from a page? My end result I am trying to accomplish is that I don't care about any of the specially encoded characters. I want to delete encoded characters and keep the raw text. Can I skip all of the above an tell BeautifulSoup to just strip anything that is encoded?

Answer 1

When attempting to determine the character encoding of a page, I believe the order that should be tried is:

1. Determine from the HTML page itself via meta tags (e.g. <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">)
2. Determine encoding via the HTTP headers (e.g. Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1)
3. Finally, if the above don't yield anything, you can do something like use an algorithm to determine the character encoding of a page using the distribution of bytes within it (note that isn't guaranteed to find the right encoding). Check out the chardet library for this option.

Answer 2

I decided to just go with whatever BeautifulSoup spits out. Then as I parse through each word in the document, if I can't convert it to a string, I just disregard it.

for word in doc.lower().split(): 
        try:
            word = str(word)
            word = self.handlePunctuation(word)
            if word == False:
                continue
        except UnicodeEncodeError, e:
            #word couldn't be converted to string; most likely encoding garbage we can toss anyways
            continue