How to Resolve \'TypeError: can\'t use a string pattern on a bytes-like object in re.findall()\' When Extracting Text from Web Pages?

TypeError: Using a String Pattern on a Bytes-Like Object in re.findall()

When attempting to extract text using regular expressions in Python, you may encounter the error "TypeError: can't use a string pattern on a bytes-like object in re.findall()". This error occurs when you use a string regex pattern to search a bytes-like object, which is often encountered when working with web pages.

To resolve this issue, it's necessary to decode the bytes-like object into a string before applying the regex search. In the code provided:

import urllib.request
import re

url = "http://www.google.com"
regex = r'<title>(,+?)</title>'
pattern  = re.compile(regex)

with urllib.request.urlopen(url) as response:
   html = response.read().decode('utf-8') # Decode the bytes-like object

title = re.findall(pattern, html)
print(title)

By decoding the html variable using .decode('utf-8'), we convert it into a Unicode string that can be processed by the regex pattern. This will allow the code to successfully extract the web page title.

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