[Developers] metaweb.py- when readservice returns a gzip'd response

[David Flanagan]

Bob,

I'm the author of metaweb.py, but I'm stumped by this problem.  I've 
never seen it in my own tests of the module.  Perhaps one of the Metaweb 
engineers can tell us when and under what circumstances Metaweb 
compresses its response. (I would have liked to believe that urllib2 
would handle content-encoding for us transparently, but I guess it doesn't.)

Are you using urllib2 elsewhere in your application?  Could you somehow 
have set something to tell the metaweb services that you'd like gzipped 
repsonses?  (I'm not much of a pythonista, and I don't know anything 
about HTTP and compression, so I'm just guessing here...)

Are you using a complete standard Python 2.4 with its standard urllib2?

	David Flanagan

I have a new (and hopefully improved) version of metaweb.py developed 
for a new version of the Metaweb documentation.  Its completely 
incompatible with the old version, and only the read methods work right 
now.  But let me know if you'd like to try it out!


Bob Skinner wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm just getting started with the python interface using the metaweb.py 
> example from Appendix B. (Using python 2.4)
> 
> Using the .login or .read methods right "out of the box" always returned a
> "ValueError: No JSON object could be decoded" error in the 
> simplejson.load call.
> 
> The reason was the response was gzip encoded, I had to change the read 
> method from:
> 
>     f = urllib2.urlopen(req)        # Open the URL
>     response = simplejson.load(f)
> 
> to:
> 
>     f = urllib2.urlopen(req)        # Open the URL
>     if 'Content-Encoding' in f.info() and f.info()['Content-Encoding'] 
> == 'gzip':
>         buf = cStringIO.StringIO(f.read())
>         gbuf = gzip.GzipFile(mode='rb', fileobj=buf)
>         response = simplejson.load(gbuf)   # Parse JSON response to an 
> object
>     else:
>         response = simplejson.load(f)
> 
> 
> I couldn't find anything on the documentation or in the developer 
> mailing list archives to this end.    Is there some better way of 
> handling this that I should be using?
> 
> best regards,
> Bob Skinner
> 
> p.s.   I think you guys are on to something HUGE with Freebase.  Your 
> implementation/api looks stellar.  I'm a big fan.
> 
> 
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