Saving decoded byte data vs print - python-3.x

I have a sql script that is saved as binary data. I read it in the standard way.
with open('data.sql', 'rb') as f:
var = f.read()
var_text = var.decode('utf-8', errors='replace)
When I go to print the var_text, it shows as normal text
print(var_text)
>>>> �-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Propensity MSF Managed Investing (MI) 2.0.0 r
But when variable itself is still in its byte representation, which means I can't perform regex on the script. I need to be able to save the text in it's string representation form so I can search for patterns.
var_text
>>>> '��-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00-\x00\r\x00\n\x00-\x00-\x00 \x00P\x00r\x00o\x00p\x00e\x00n\x00s\x00i\x00t\x00y\x00 \x00M\x00S\x00F\x00 \x00M\x00a\x00n\x00a\x00g\x00e\x00d\x00 \x00I\x00n\x00v\x00e\x00s\x00t\x00i\x00n\x00g\x00 \x00(\x00M\x00I\x00)\x00 \x002\x00.\x000\x00.\x000\x00 \x00r\x00'
I was under the assumption that decoding the bytes would do the trick, but no dice. How can I save the object as plain text?

Related

Parsing a non-Unicode string with Flask-RESTful

I have a webhook developed with Flask-RESTful which gets several parameters with POST.
One of the parameters is a non-Unicode string, encoded in cp1251.
Can't find a way to correctly parse this argument using reqparse.
Here is the fragment of my code:
parser = reqparse.RequestParser()
parser.add_argument('text')
msg = parser.parse_args()
Then, I write msg to a text file, and it looks like this:
{"text": "\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd !\n\n\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\n\n-- \n\ufffd \ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd."}
As you can see, Flask somehow replaces all Cyrillic characters with \ufffd. At the same time, non-Cyrillic characters, like ! or \n are processed correctly.
Anything I can do to advise RequestParser with the string encoding?
Here is my code for writing the text to disk:
f = open('log_msg.txt', 'w+')
f.write(json.dumps(msg))
f.close()
I tried f = open('log_msg.txt', 'w+', encoding='cp1251') with the same result.
Then, I tried
f = open('log_msg_ascii.txt', 'w+')
f.write(ascii(json.dumps(msg)))
Also, no difference.
So, I'm pretty sure it's RequestParser() tries to be too smart and can't understand the non-Unicode input.
Thanks!
Okay, I finally found a workaround. Thanks to #lenz for helping me with this issue. It seems that reqparse wrongly assumes that every string parameter comes as UTF-8. So when it sees a non-Unicode input field (among other Unicode fields!), it tries to load it as Unicode and fails. As a result, all characters are U+FFFD (replacement character).
So, to access that non-Unicode field, I did the following trick.
First, I load raw data using get_data(), decode it using cp1251 and parse with a simple regexp.
raw_data = request.get_data()
contents = raw_data.decode('windows-1251')
match = re.search(r'(?P<delim>--\w+\r?\n)Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"text\"\r?\n(.*?)(?P=delim)', contents, re.MULTILINE | re.DOTALL)
text = match.group(2)
Not the most beautiful solution, but it works.

How to convert Hex to original file format?

I have a .tgz file that was formatted as shell code, it looks like this (Hex):
"\x1F\x8B\x08\x00\x44\x7A\x91\x4F\x00\x03\xED\x59\xED\x72.."
It was generated this way (python3):
import os
def main():
dump_src = "MyPlugin.tgz"
fc = ""
try:
with open(dump_src, 'rb') as fd:
fcr = fd.read()
for byte in bytearray(fcr):
fc += "\\x{:02x}".format(byte)
except:
fcr = dump_src
for byte in bytearray(fcr):
fc += "\\x{:02x}".format(byte)
print(fc)
# failed attempt:
fcback = bytes(int(fc[i+2:i+4], 16) for i in range(0, len(fc), 4))
print (fcback)
if __name__ == "__main__":
main()
How can I convert this back to the original tgz archive?
Edit: failed attempt in the last section outputs this:
b'\x8b\x00\x10]\x03\x93o0\x85%\xe2!\xa4H\xf1Fi\xa7\x15\xf61&\x13N\xd9[\xfag\x11V\x97\xd3\xfb%\xf7\xe3\\\xae\xc2\xff\xa4>\xaf\x11\xcc\x93\xf1\x0c\x93\xa4\x1b\xefxj\xc3?\xf9\xc1\xe8\xd1\xd9\x01\x97qB"\x1a\x08\x9cO\x7f\xe9\x19\xe3\x9c\x05\xf2\x04a\xaa\x00A,\x15"RN-\xb6\x18K\x85\xa1\x11\x83\xac/\xffR\x8a\xa19\xde\x10\x0b\x08\x85\x93\xfc]\x8a^\xd2-T\x92\x9a\xcc-W\xc7|\xba\x9c\xb3\xa6V0V H1\x98\xde\x03#\x14\'\n 1Y\xf7R\x14\xe2#\xbe*:\xe0\xc8\xbb\xc9\x0bo\x8bm\xed.\xfd\xae\xef\x9fT&\xa1\xf4\xcf\xa7F\xf4\xef\xbb"8"\xb5\xab,\x9c\xbb\xfc3\x8b\xf5\x88\xf4A\x0ek%5eO\xf4:f\x0b\xd6\x1bi\xb6\xf3\xbf\xf7\xf9\xad\xb5[\xdba7\xb8\xf9\xcd\xba\xdd,;c\x0b\xaaT"\xd4\x96\x17\xda\x07\x87& \xceH\xd6\xbf\xd2\xeb\xb4\xaf\xbd\xc2\xee\xfc\'3zU\x17>\xde\x06u\xe3G\x7f\x1e\xf3\xdf\xb6\x04\x10A\x04\x10A\x04\x10A\x04\x10A\xff\x9f\xab\xe8(\x00'
And when I output it to a file (e.g. via python3 main.py > MyFile.tgz) the file is corrupted.
Since you know the format of the data (each byte is encoded as a string of 4 characters in the format "\xAB") it's easy to revert the conversion and get the original bytes again. It'll only take one line of Python code:
data = bytes(int(fc[i+2:i+4], 16) for i in range(0, len(fc), 4))
This uses:
range(start, stop, step) with step 4 to iterate in groups of 4 characters through your string
slicing to get each group of 2 hexadecimal digits
int(x, base) to convert the hexadecimal string to an integer
a generator expression to immediately pass the converted elements to:
bytes() to create a bytes object with the data
The variable data is now of type bytes and you could directly write it to a file (to decompress with an external zip program), or pass it to zlib.decompress() (to further process it in Python).
UPDATE (follow-up on the comments and updated question):
Firstly, I have tested the above code and it does result in the same bytes as the input. Are you really sure that the example output in your question is the actual result of the code in your question? Please try to be careful when copying code and/or output. A few remarks:
Your code is not properly formatted, so I cannot run it without making modifications. And when I have made modifications to the code, I might run different code than you do, yielding different results. So next time please copy-paste your exact (working, tested) code without modifications.
The format string in your code uses lowercase hexadecimal format, and your first example output uses uppercase. So that output cannot be from this code.
I don't have access to your file "MyPlugin.tgz", but when I test your code with another .tgz file (after fixing the IndentationErrors), my output is correct. It starts with \x1f\x8b as expected (this is the magic number in the gzip header). I can't explain why your output is different...
Secondly, it seems like you don't fully understand how bytes and string representations work. When you write print(fcback), a string representation of the Python object fcback (in this case a bytes object) is printed. The string representation of a bytes object is not the same as the binary data! When printing a bytes object, each byte that corresponds to a printable ASCII character is replaced by that character, other bytes are escaped (similar to the formatted string that your code generates). Also, it starts with b' and ends with '.
You cannot print binary data to your terminal and then pipe the output to a file. This will result in a different file. The correct way to write the data to a file is using file.write(data) in your Python code.
Here's a fully working example:
def binary_to_text(data):
"""Convert a bytes object to a formatted text string."""
text = ""
for byte in data:
text += "\\x{:02x}".format(byte)
return text
def text_to_binary(text):
"""Convert a formatted text string to a bytes object."""
return bytes(int(text[i+2:i+4], 16) for i in range(0, len(text), 4))
def main():
# Read the binary data from input file:
with open('MyPlugin.tgz', 'rb') as input_file:
input_data = input_file.read()
# Convert binary to text (based on your original code):
text = binary_to_text(input_data)
print(text[0:100])
# Convert the text back to binary:
output_data = text_to_binary(text)
print(output_data[0:100])
# Write the binary data back to a file:
with open('MyPlugin-restored.tgz', 'wb') as output_file:
output_file.write(output_data)
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()
Note that I only print the first 100 elements to keep the output short. Also notice that the second print-statement prints a much longer text. This is because the first print gets 100 characters (which are printed "as is"), while the second print gets 100 bytes (of which most bytes are escaped, causing the output to be longer).

Writing to files in ASCII with Python3, not UTF8

I have a program that I created with two sections.
The first one copies a text file with an integer in the middle of the file name in this format.
file = "Filename" + "str(int)" + ".txt"
the user can create as many copies of the file that they would like.
The second part of the program is what I am having the problem with. There is an integer at the very bottom of the file that is to correspond with the integer in the file name. After the first part is done, I open each file one at a time in "r+" read/write format. So I can file.seek(1000) to about where the integer is in the file.
Now in my opinion the next part should be easy. I should just simply have to write str(int) into the file right here. But it wasn't that easy. It worked just fine doing it like that in Linux at home, but at work on Windows it proved difficult. What I ended up having to do after file.seek(1000) is write to the file using Unicode UTF-8. I accomplished this with this code snippet of the rest of the program. I will document it so that it is able to be understood what is going on. Instead of having to write this in Unicode, I would love to be able to write this in good old regular English ASCII characters. Eventually this program will be expanded to include a lot more data at the bottom of each file. Having to write the data in Unicode is going to make things extremely difficult. If I just write the data without turning it into Unicode this is the result. This string is supposed to say #2 =1534, instead it says #2 =ㄠ㌵433.
If someone can show me what I am doing wrong that would be great. I would love to just use something like file.write('1534') to write the data to the file instead of having to do it in Unicode UTF-8.
while a1 < d1 :
file = "file" + str(a1) + ".par"
f = open(file, "r+")
f.seek(1011)
data = f.read() #reads the data from that point in the file into a variable.
numList= list(str(a1)) # "a1" is the integer in the file name. I had to turn the integer into a list to accomplish the next task.
replaceData = '\x00' + numList[0] + '\x00' + numList[1] + '\x00' + numList[2] + '\x00' + numList[3] + '\x00' #This line turns the integer into Utf 8 Unicode. I am by no means a Unicode expert.
currentData = data #probably didn't need to be done now that I'm looking at this.
data = data.replace(currentData, replaceData) #replaces the Utf 8 string in the "data" variable with the new Utf 8 string in "replaceData."
f.seek(1011) # Return to where I need to be in the file to write the data.
f.write(data) # Write the new Unicode data to the file
f.close() #close the file
f.close() #make sure the file is closed (sometimes it seems that this fails in Windows.)
a1 += 1 #advances the integer, and then return to the top of the loop
This is an example of writing to a file in ASCII. You need to open the file in byte mode, and using the .encode method for strings is a convenient way to get the end result you want.
s = '12345'
ascii = s.encode('ascii')
with open('somefile', 'wb') as f:
f.write(ascii)
You can obviously also open in rb+ (read and write byte mode) in your case if the file already exists.
with open('somefile', 'rb+') as f:
existing = f.read()
f.write(b'ascii without encoding!')
You can also just pass string literals with the b prefix, and they will be encoded with ascii as shown in the second example.

Node Buffers, from utf8 to binary

I'm receiving data as utf8 from a source and this data was originally in binary form (it was a Buffer). I have to convert back this data to a Buffer. I'm having a hard time figuring how to do this.
Here's a small sample that shows my problem:
var hexString = 'e61b08020304e61c09020304e61d0a020304e61e65';
var buffer1 = new Buffer(hexString, 'hex');
var str = buffer1.toString('utf8');
var buffer2 = new Buffer(str, 'utf8');
console.log('original content:', hexString);
console.log('buffer1 contains:', buffer1.toString('hex'));
console.log('buffer2 contains:', buffer2.toString('hex'));
prints
original content: e61b08020304e61c09020304e61d0a020304e61e65
buffer1 contains: e61b08020304e61c09020304e61d0a020304e61e65
buffer2 contains: efbfbd1b08020304efbfbd1c09020304efbfbd1d0a020304efbfbd1e65
Here, I would like buffer2 to be the exact same thing as buffer1.
How can I convert an utf8 string to its original binary Buffer?
You cannot expect binary data converted to utf8 and back again to be the same as the original binary data because of the way utf8 works (especially when invalid utf8 characters are replaced with \ufffd).
You have to use another format that correctly preserves the data. This could be 'hex', 'base64', 'binary', or some other binary-safe format provided by a third-party module. Obviously you should probably keep it as a Buffer if you can.
The accepted answer is misleading. Your main problem is that you're dealing with invalid UTF-8. If the data were valid, the conversion would not cause issues.
Specifically, take the first two bytes: e61b.
In binary, that's: 11100110, 00011011. This is invalid. Take a look at this diagram from the utf-8 wikipedia page.
This says that if a byte starts with 1110, the next byte must start with two bytes starting with 10 after it. This is not the case here.
Whenever js hits an invalid character, it replaces it with �, the unicode replacement character. The codepoint for that is U+FFFD, and the utf-8 encoding of that code point is efbfbd. Notice that this shows up in your output a few times.

Extracting source code from html file using python3.1 urllib.request

I'm trying to obtain data using regular expressions from a html file, by implementing the following code:
import urllib.request
def extract_words(wdict, urlname):
uf = urllib.request.urlopen(urlname)
text = uf.read()
print (text)
match = re.findall("<tr>\s*<td>([\w\s.;'(),-/]+)</td>\s+<td>([\w\s.,;'()-/]+)</td>\s*</tr>", text)
which returns an error:
File "extract.py", line 33, in extract_words
match = re.findall("<tr>\s*<td>([\w\s.;'(),-/]+)</td>\s+<td>([\w\s.,;'()-/]+)</td>\s*</tr>", text)
File "/usr/lib/python3.1/re.py", line 192, in findall
return _compile(pattern, flags).findall(string)
TypeError: can't use a string pattern on a bytes-like object
Upon experimenting further in the IDLE, I noticed that the uf.read() indeed returns the html source code the first time I invoke it. But then onwards, it returns a - b''. Is there any way to get around this?
uf.read() will only read the contents once. Then you have to close it and reopen it to read it again. This is true for any kind of stream. This is however not the problem.
The problem is that reading from any kind of binary source, such as a file or a webpage, will return the data as a bytes type, unless you specify an encoding. But your regexp is not specified as a bytes type, it's specified as a unicode str.
The re module will quite reasonably refuse to use unicode patterns on byte data, and the other way around.
The solution is to make the regexp pattern a bytes string, which you do by putting a b in front of it. Hence:
match = re.findall(b"<tr>\s*<td>([\w\s.;'(),-/]+)</td>\s+<td>([\w\s.,;'()-/]+)</td>\s*</tr>", text)
Should work. Another option is to decode the text so it also is a unicode str:
encoding = uf.headers.getparam('charset')
text = text.decode(encoding)
match = re.findall("<tr>\s*<td>([\w\s.;'(),-/]+)</td>\s+<td>([\w\s.,;'()-/]+)</td>\s*</tr>", text)
(Also, to extract data from HTML, I would say that lxml is a better option).

Resources