how to send an array of URI's from php to python and print it there

Question

I am trying to send array of URI's from my php to my python scraper. the array contains links to scrape.

I got example from here, and it worked fine with sending array of integer, but when I try to fill the array using URI's, error showed up.

php snippet:

$array = ["https://www.google.com/","https://www.google.com/","https://www.google.com/"];
//$array = [1,2,3]; // This is worked fine
$resultScript= system('python C:\xampp\htdocs\selenium\dummy.py '   .escapeshellarg(json_encode($array)));
$resultData = json_decode($resultScript, true);
var_dump($resultData);

python :

import sys
import json
def jsontoarray(json_data):
    data = json.loads(json_data)
    print(json.dumps(data))
jsontoarray(sys.argv[1])
print(data)

result from my IDE

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\xampp\htdocs\selenium\dummy.py", line 8, in <module>
    jsontoarray(sys.argv[1])
  File "C:\xampp\htdocs\selenium\dummy.py", line 6, in jsontoarray
    data = json.loads(json_data)
  File "C:\Users\PC2\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36-32\lib\json\__init__.py", line 354, in loads
    return _default_decoder.decode(s)
  File "C:\Users\PC2\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36-32\lib\json\decoder.py", line 339, in decode
    obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
  File "C:\Users\PC2\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36-32\lib\json\decoder.py", line 357, in raw_decode
    raise JSONDecodeError("Expecting value", s, err.value) from None
json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 3 (char 2)
NULL

Process finished with exit code 0

the print result was : [ https:\/\/www.google.com\/ , https:\/\/www.google.com\/ , https:\/\/www.google.com\/ ] — Fredd, Dec 11 '18 at 07:32
you gets list and should str. First value in list jsontoarray(sys.argv[1][0]) — Dmitry Erohin, Dec 11 '18 at 07:51

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 11 '18 at 07:29

As said here, reason of getting error like:

json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 3 (char 2)

can be:

non-JSON conforming quoting
XML/HTML output (that is, a string starting with <), or
incompatible character encoding

So based what you have I would bet that there is encoding problem.

Take a look on your PHP file and make sure it's UTF-8 encoded.
Check Python script file encoding and it would be good if you add at the beginning of the file line below to enforce proper encoding.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

so your python file will look like:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import sys
import json
def jsontoarray(json_data):
    data = json.loads(json_data)
    print(json.dumps(data))
jsontoarray(sys.argv[1])

additionally for debuging you could print type of sys.argv[1]:

print(type(sys.argv[1]))

you should get string or bytes (for UTF-8) string. If you got something else you could convert it into string like:

str(sys.argv[1])

how to send an array of URI's from php to python and print it there

1 Answers1