twitter trends api UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x8b in position 1: unexpected code byte
Solution
`byte 0x8b in position 1` usually signals that the data stream is gzipped. For similar problems, see here and here.
To unzip the data stream:
buf = StringIO.StringIO(<response object>.content)
gzip_f = gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=buf)
content = gzip_f.read()
Problem
I am trying to follow the sample code of the book "Mining the social web", 1-3. I know its old so I follow the new sample from the web page enter link description here BUT, SOMETIMES, I will suffer a Error info when I implement the code: ``` [ trend.decode('utf-8') for trend in world_trends()[0]['trends'] ] ``` And the error info is like this: ``` Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-universal/egg/twitter/api.py", line 167, in __call__ File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-universal/egg/twitter/api.py", line 173, in _handle_response File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/encodings/utf_8.py", line 16, in decode return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True) UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x8b in position 1: unexpected code byte ``` It doesnt always happen, but I think no programmer likes such a "random" case. So could anyone help me on this issue? Whats the problem and how I can solve this? Great thanks~