Detect http response encoding with aiohttp

Question

I'm trying to learn how to use asyncio to build an asynchronous web crawler. The following is a crude crawler to test out the framework:

import asyncio, aiohttp
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

@asyncio.coroutine
def fetch(url):
    with (yield from sem):
        print(url)
        response = yield from aiohttp.request('GET',url)
        response = yield from response.read_and_close()
    return response.decode('utf-8')

@asyncio.coroutine
def get_links(url):
    page = yield from fetch(url)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
    links = soup.find_all('a',href=True)
    return [link['href'] for link in links if link['href'].find('www') != -1]

@asyncio.coroutine
def crawler(seed, depth, max_depth=3):
    while True:
        if depth > max_depth:
            break
        links = yield from get_links(seed)
        depth+=1
        coros = [asyncio.Task(crawler(link,depth)) for link in links]
        yield from asyncio.gather(*coros)

sem = asyncio.Semaphore(5)
loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
loop.run_until_complete(crawler("http://www.bloomberg.com",0))

Whilst asyncio seems to be documented quite well, aiohttp seems to have very little documentation so I'm struggling to work some things out myself.

Firstly, is there a way for us to detect the encoding of page response? Secondly, can we request that the connections are kept-alive within a session? Or is this by default True like in requests?

Answer 1

You can look on response.headers['Content-Type'] or use chardet library for bad-formed HTTP responses. Response body is bytes string.

For keep-alive connections you should use connector like:

connector = aiohttp.TCPConnector(share_cookies=True)

response1 = yield from aiohttp.request('get', url1, connector=connector)
body1 = yield from response1.read_and_close()
response2 = aiohttp.request('get', url2, connector=connector)
body2 = yield from response2.read_and_close()