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

Introduction

When crawling web pages with Python, Chinese characters can become unreadable due to encoding mismatches. This guide, prompted by a fan's question, outlines three effective ways to handle such garbled text.

Idea

The core idea is to process the garbled part either by pre‑encoding the whole page or by fixing the specific Chinese fragments.

Analysis

Typical garbled cases include:

Page encoded in GBK but printed as unreadable bytes, e.g.

ÃÀÅ® µçÄÔ×À ¼üÅÌ »ú·¿ ¿É°® С½ã½ã4k±ÚÖ½

Another GBK‑encoded output that looks normal in the console but shows nonsense characters, e.g. �װŮ�� ��Ů ˮ СϪ Ψ�� Even though the program exits without error ( Process finished with exit code 0), the displayed Chinese is incomprehensible.

Implementation

Method 1: Use requests.get().content instead of .text

Fetching the raw bytes avoids the automatic decoding that causes garbling.

After switching to .content, the text displays correctly.

Method 2: Manually set the page encoding

# 手动设定响应数据的编码格式
response.encoding = response.apparent_encoding

This forces requests to use the detected encoding, which works for most beginners.

You can also directly specify gbk as the encoding.

Method 3: Use a universal encode‑decode trick

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

Apply this conversion to any string that appears garbled, as demonstrated below.

Conclusion

The three methods—using .content, manually setting the encoding, and applying a universal encode‑decode conversion—effectively resolve Chinese garbled text in Python web scraping. Readers are encouraged to try them and share additional solutions.