How to Fix Chinese Garbled Text in Python Web Scraping: 3 Proven Methods

Introduction

A fan asked why Chinese characters become unreadable during Python web crawling, showing screenshots of garbled output. This guide collects three effective ways to handle such encoding issues.

Method 1: Use response.content Instead of response.text

When the response is accessed via .text, the decoded string may contain mojibake. Switching to .content returns the raw bytes, which can be decoded correctly.

Method 2: Manually Set the Page Encoding

# Manually set response encoding
response.encoding = response.apparent_encoding

This approach explicitly tells requests which charset to use, making the printed text readable.

Method 3: Apply a Generic Encode‑Decode Conversion

img_name.encode('iso-8859-1').decode('gbk')

For isolated garbled strings, converting from iso-8859-1 to gbk restores the original Chinese characters.

Conclusion

The three methods—using .content, manually setting response.encoding, and applying a generic encode‑decode conversion—effectively resolve Chinese garbled text problems in Python web scraping, enabling clean data extraction.