Python error: Type error: POST data should be bytes; also user-agent issue
post, python-3.x
Solution
data = urllib.parse.urlencode(values)
type(data) #this returns <class 'str'>. it's a string
The urllib docs say for `urllib.request.Request(url, data ...)`:
The urllib.parse.urlencode() function takes a mapping or sequence of 2-tuples and returns a string in this format. It should be encoded to bytes before being used as the data parameter. etc etc
(emphasis mine)
So you have a string that looks right, what you need is that string encoded into bytes. And you choose the encoding.
binary_data = data.encode(encoding)
in the above line: encoding can be 'utf-8' or 'ascii' or a bunch of other things. Pick whichever one the server expects.
So you end up with something that looks like:
data = urllib.parse.urlencode(values)
binary_data = data.encode(encoding)
req = urllib.request.Request(url, binary_data)
Problem
Using the following code I received an error: ``` TypeError: POST data should be bytes or an iterable of bytes. It cannot be str ``` Second concern, I am not sure if I specified my user-agent correctly, here's my user-agent in whole: `Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/22.0.1229.94 Safari/537.4`. I gave my best shot as I defined the user-agent in the script. ``` import urllib.parse import urllib.request url = 'http://getliberty.org/contact-us/' user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Chrome/22.0.1229.94; Windows NT)' values = {'Your Name' : 'Horatio', 'Your Email' : '6765Minus4181@gmail.com', 'Subject' : 'Hello', 'Your Message' : 'Cheers'} headers = {'User-Agent': user_agent } data = urllib.parse.urlencode(values) req = urllib.request.Request(url, data) response = urllib.request.urlopen(req) the_page = response.read() ``` I am aware of this similar question, TypeError: POST data should be bytes or an iterable of bytes. It cannot be str, but am too new for the answer to be much help.