I'm working on a twitch irc bot and one of the components I wanted to have available was the ability for the bot to save quotes to a pastebin paste on close, and then retrieve the same quotes on start up.
I've started with the saving part, and have hit a road block where I can't seem to get a valid post, and I can't figure out a method.
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import urllib.parse
import urllib.request
# --------------------------------------------- Pastebin Requisites --------------------------------------------------
pastebin_key = 'my pastebin key' # developer api key, required. GET: http://pastebin.com/api
pastebin_password = 'password' # password for pastebin_username
pastebin_postexp = 'N' # N = never expire
pastebin_private = 0 # 0 = Public 1 = unlisted 2 = Private
pastebin_url = 'http://pastebin.com/api/api_post.php'
pastebin_username = 'username' # user corresponding with key
# --------------------------------------------- Value clean up --------------------------------------------------
pastebin_password = urllib.parse.quote(pastebin_password, safe='/')
pastebin_username = urllib.parse.quote(pastebin_username, safe='/')
# --------------------------------------------- Pastebin Functions --------------------------------------------------
def post(title, content): # used for posting a new paste
pastebin_vars = {'api_option': 'paste', 'api_user_key': pastebin_username, 'api_paste_private': pastebin_private,
'api_paste_name': title, 'api_paste_expire_date': pastebin_postexp, 'api_dev_key': pastebin_key,
'api_user_password': pastebin_password, 'api_paste_code': content}
try:
str_to_paste = ', '.join("{!s}={!r}".format(key, val) for (key, val) in pastebin_vars.items()) # dict to str :D
str_to_paste = str_to_paste.replace(":", "") # remove :
str_to_paste = str_to_paste.replace("'", "") # remove '
str_to_paste = str_to_paste.replace(")", "") # remove )
str_to_paste = str_to_paste.replace(", ", "&") # replace dividers with &
urllib.request.urlopen(pastebin_url, urllib.parse.urlencode(pastebin_vars)).read()
print('did that work?')
except:
print("post submit failed :(")
print(pastebin_url + "?" + str_to_paste) # print the output for test
post("test", "stuff")
I'm open to importing more libraries and stuff, not really sure what I'm doing wrong after working on this for two days straight :S
First, your try
/except
block is throwing away the actual error. You should almost never use a "bare" except
clause without capturing or re-raising the original exception. See this article for a full explanation.
Once you remove the try
/except
, and you will see the underlying error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "paste.py", line 42, in post
urllib.request.urlopen(pastebin_url, urllib.parse.urlencode(pastebin_vars)).read()
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/urllib/request.py", line 161, in urlopen
return opener.open(url, data, timeout)
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/urllib/request.py", line 461, in open
req = meth(req)
File "/usr/lib/python3.4/urllib/request.py", line 1112, in do_request_
raise TypeError(msg)
TypeError: POST data should be bytes or an iterable of bytes. It cannot be of type str.
This means you're trying to pass a unicode string into a function that's expecting bytes. When you do I/O (like reading/writing files on disk, or sending/receiving data over HTTP) you typically need to encode any unicode strings as bytes. See this presentation for a good explanation of unicode vs. bytes and when you need to encode and decode.
Next, this line:
urllib.request.urlopen(pastebin_url, urllib.parse.urlencode(pastebin_vars)).read()
Is throwing away the response, so you have no way of knowing the result of your API call. Assign this to a variable or return it from your function so you can then inspect the value. It will either be a URL to the paste, or an error message from the API.
Next, I think your code is sending a lot of unnecessary parameters to the API and your str_to_paste
statements aren't necessary.
I was able to make a paste using the following, much simpler, code:
import urllib.parse
import urllib.request
PASTEBIN_KEY = 'my-api-key' # developer api key, required. GET: http://pastebin.com/api
PASTEBIN_URL = 'http://pastebin.com/api/api_post.php'
def post(title, content): # used for posting a new paste
pastebin_vars = dict(
api_option='paste',
api_dev_key=PASTEBIN_KEY,
api_paste_name=title,
api_paste_code=content,
)
return urllib.request.urlopen(PASTEBIN_URL, urllib.parse.urlencode(pastebin_vars).encode('utf8')).read()
Here it is in use:
>>> post("test", "hello\nworld.")
b'http://pastebin.com/v8jCkHDB'