Neatly printing a .txt file in python

Question

I have a .txt file with text like the following:

Project Gutenberg Australia
a treasure-trove of literature
treasure found hidden with no evidence of ownership

but whenever I try to read this file in Python (using Flask - I'm uploading the file to a site), using the following lines:

    if request.method == 'POST':
        f = request.files['file']
        f.save(secure_filename(f.filename))
        f.stream.seek(0)
        content = f.read()
    return render_template("book.html", text=content)

My "book.html" file is like the following:

<pre>
{{ text }}
</pre>

I get something like the following:

b'\xef\xbb\xbf\r\nProject Gutenberg Australia\r\na treasure-trove of literature\r\ntreasure found hidden with no evidence of ownership\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\...]

How can I fix this so that what is displayed on my site is just like what is displayed in the .txt file? Do I need to modify "book.html" or just read the file differently with Python?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You just need to .decode() your bytes:

print(b'\xef\xbb\xbf\r\nProject Gutenberg Australia\r\na treasure-trove of literature\r\ntreasure found hidden with no evidence of ownership\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\...]'.decode())

gives:

Project Gutenberg Australia
a treasure-trove of literature
treasure found hidden with no evidence of ownership



\...]