Handling UTF-8 Encoding in Web Crawlers: When scraping content from websites, encoding issues can often arise, especially with special characters. If you’re working with web crawlers, it’s crucial to ensure that the content is decoded properly. Using the requests library in Python, you can explicitly set the encoding to UTF-8 to avoid these issues:
import requests
response = requests.get("http://example.com")
response.encoding = 'utf-8' # Explicitly set the encoding to UTF-8
decoded_content = response.text
print(decoded_content)
By setting the encoding to UTF-8 before extracting the content, you ensure that the returned string is correctly decoded, making it much easier to work with special characters. This approach also helps in web scraping where decoding in python decode utf-8 is essential for accuracy.