Passing a string but getting byte attribute error to urllib.request.read

Question

I am trying to read an XML file from the Yahoo finance API. So far, I've tried the following:

 from xml.dom.minidom import parse
 #Start Get Employees
        xml = urllib.request.urlopen('https://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20*%20from%20yahoo.finance.stocks%20where%20symbol%3D%22wfc%22&diagnostics=true&env=store%3A%2F%2Fdatatables.org%2Falltableswithkeys')
        dom = parse(xml.read())
        numemployees = dom.getElementsByTagName('FullTimeEmployees')
        numemployees = name[0].firstChild.nodeValue
 #End Get Employees

However, this raises an exception:

AttributeError: 'bytes' object has no attribute 'read'

I think this is because if it doesn't recognize the string, it assumes I'm passing a byte pattern. However, I am passing a string so I don't know what the problem is here.

Full Stack Trace:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Python34\lib\tkinter\__init__.py", line 1487, in __call__
    return self.func(*args)
  File "C:\Users\kylec\Desktop\dm\Mail Server Finder\mailserverfinder.py", line 25, in getServers
    dom = parse(xml.read())
  File "C:\Python34\lib\xml\dom\minidom.py", line 1960, in parse
    return expatbuilder.parse(file)
  File "C:\Python34\lib\xml\dom\expatbuilder.py", line 913, in parse
    result = builder.parseFile(file)
  File "C:\Python34\lib\xml\dom\expatbuilder.py", line 204, in parseFile
    buffer = file.read(16*1024)
AttributeError: 'bytes' object has no attribute 'read'

The xml.read() call isn't failing. What's the full backtrace? Where is parse coming from? — dano
– dano, Commented Jun 6, 2014 at 15:50

dano · Accepted Answer · 2014-06-06 16:02:30Z

1

xml.dom.minidom.parse is excepting a file-like object, not a bytes or str, as stated in its documentation:

xml.dom.minidom.parse(filename_or_file[, parser[, bufsize]])

Return a Document from the given input. filename_or_file may be either a file name, or a file-like object.

So you just need to do this:

dom = parse(xml)

Because the http.client.HTTPResponse object returned by urlopen is file-like.

edited Jun 6, 2014 at 16:02

answered Jun 6, 2014 at 15:54

dano

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Mauro Baraldi · Accepted Answer · 2014-06-06 16:15:35Z

0

Kyle, sorry but your example isn't clear enough. I think this is what you expected to do.

from xml.dom.minidom import parseString

employees = urllib.urlopen('https://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20*%20from%20yahoo.finance.stocks%20where%20symbol%3D%22wfc%22&diagnostics=true&env=store%3A%2F%2Fdatatables.org%2Falltableswithkeys').read()
dom = parseString(employees)
numemployees = dom.getElementsByTagName('FullTimeEmployees')
numemployees = numeemployees[0].firstChild.nodeValue

answered Jun 6, 2014 at 16:15

Mauro Baraldi

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