python, vobject, encoding, vcards

Question

I am using vobject in python. I am attempting to parse the vcard located here:

http://www.mayerbrown.com/people/vCard.aspx?Attorney=1150

to do this, I do the following:

    import urllib
    import vobject

    vcard = urllib.urlopen("http://www.mayerbrown.com/people/vCard.aspx?Attorney=1150").read()
    vcard_object = vobject.readOne(vcard)

Whenever I do this, I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#86>", line 1, in <module>
    vobject.readOne(urllib.urlopen("http://www.mayerbrown.com/people/vCard.aspx?Attorney=1150").read())
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\vobject-0.8.1c-py2.7.egg\vobject\base.py", line 1078, in readOne
    ignoreUnreadable, allowQP).next()
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\vobject-0.8.1c-py2.7.egg\vobject\base.py", line 1031, in readComponents
    vline = textLineToContentLine(line, n)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\vobject-0.8.1c-py2.7.egg\vobject\base.py", line 888, in textLineToContentLine
    return ContentLine(*parseLine(text, n), **{'encoded':True, 'lineNumber' : n})
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\vobject-0.8.1c-py2.7.egg\vobject\base.py", line 262, in __init__
    self.value = str(self.value).decode('quoted-printable')
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xfc' in position 29: ordinal not in range(128)

I have tried a number of other variations on this, such as converting vcard into unicode, using various encodings,etc. But I always get the same, or a very similar, error message.

Any ideas on how to fix this?

Answer 1

It's failing on line 13 of the vCard because the ADR property is incorrectly marked as being encoded in the "quoted-printable" encoding. The ü character should be encoded as =FC, which is why vobject is throwing the error.

Answer 2

File is downloaded as UTF-8 (i think) encoded string, but library tries to interpret it as ASCII.

Try adding following line after urlopen:

vcard = vcard.decode('utf-8')

Answer 3

vobject library readOne method is pretty awkward.

To avoid problems I decided to persist in my database the vcards in form of quoted-printable data, which the one likes.

assuming some_vcard is string with UTF-8 encoding

quopried_vcard = quopri.encodestring(some_vcard)

and the quopried_vcard gets persisted, and when needed just:

vobj = vobject.readOne(quopried_vcard)

and then to get back decoded data, e.g for fn field in vcard:

quopri.decodestring(vobj.fn.value)

Maybe somebody can handle UTF-8 with readOne better. If yes I would love to see it.