Yet another UnicodeDecodeError problem

[ashitpro]

getResponse="HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\nContent-Length: %d\r\nCache-Control: no-cache\r\n\r\n%s" % (payloadLength,byteString)
getResponse = unicode(getResponse)
 

At second line I get UnicodeDecodeError.
I am trying to replace "200 OK" from getResponse string with "500", using getResponse.replace(...)

Internally it convert string to unicode, I have just made it explicitly for better understanding.

Any help?

[bvdet]

What version of Python? Is your default encoding "ascii"? When converting from a standard string to a unicode string, a UnicodeError exception may be raised if a character that cannot be converted is encountered. A full traceback may provide the direct cause of the exception.

>>> s = "abcdef%s" % ("\xfc")
>>> print s
abcdefü
>>> unicode(s)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<interactive input>", line 1, in ?
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xfc in position 6: ordinal not in range(128)
>>> 

[ashitpro]

I am using python 2.6
Default encoding is "ascii"..

How do you tackle this problem....?

Let me make this more straight..

getResponse = getResponse + (some binary data)

getResponse.Replace("this_str","that_str")

Obviously, in second statement, it will try to decode to 'ascii' and throw exception.

Is there any standard way to deal with binary data in string, which could solve my problem?

[bvdet]

Check out the struct module.

[dwblas]

Someday I will have to take the time to learn Unicode, or just switch to Python3.X. A workaround until then is to drop down to decimal values.

s="abcdef%s200 OK\r\notherstuff" % ("\xfc")
to_find = [ord(ltr) for ltr in "200 OK"]
new_str_list = []
len_s = len(s)
for ctr in range(len_s):
    found = False
    ltr=s[ctr]
    if ord(ltr) == to_find[0]:     ## first characters match
        ## assumes the range will not go past end of line
        found = True
        for x in range(len(to_find)):
            if ord(s[ctr+x]) != to_find[x]:
                found = False         ## not a match
    if found :
        new_str_list.append("5")      ## replace "2"
    else:        
        new_str_list.append(ltr)
print "".join(new_str_list) 

[ashitpro]

I don't have problem with switching to python 3.x

Will that make any difference? If yes, how?

[dwblas]

"In Python 3, all strings are sequences of Unicode characters."
See Section 4.3 at Dive Into Python 3 for more info.