Confusing exception when non-markup passed into BeautifulSoup constructor

[Thomas E Tresch]

D:\tresc\pyTest\Scraper>python scraper.py
<bound method HTTPResponse.read of <http.client.HTTPResponse object at 0x032758B0>>
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "D:\tresc\pyTest\Scraper\scraper.py", line 22, in <module>
    Scraper(news).scrape()
  File "D:\tresc\pyTest\Scraper\scraper.py", line 13, in scrape
    sp = BeautifulSoup(xml, parser)
         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "D:\tresc\pyTest\Lib\site-packages\bs4\__init__.py", line 315, in __init__
    elif len(markup) <= 256 and (
         ^^^^^^^^^^^
TypeError: object of type 'method' has no len()

[Leonard Richardson (leonardr)]

Thanks for taking the time to file this issue. Based on the first line of your program's output, you are passing a method (http.client.HTTPResponse.read) into the BeautifulSoup constructor as the `markup` argument. This won't work. The contract of the BeautifulSoup constructor is that `markup` can be "a string or an open filehandle." (https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/#making-the-soup)

Calling the read() method would work (it returns a string), and passing in the HTTPResponse object would work (it acts like a filehandle), but passing in a method isn't supported.

For more information, see this Stack Overflow question:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57301959/beautiful-soup-error-object-of-type-method-has-no-len

I'm leaving this issue open until I decide whether or not to make a change improving the error message in situations where `markup` doesn't fulfill the necessary contract.

[Leonard Richardson (leonardr)]

I've improved the exception message (revision 8abc137 in the 4.13 branch).

[maverickwhites (maverickwhites)]

Fix for BeautifulSoup Issue

Issue:
You passed `self.news.read` (a method) instead of calling it to get the content for BeautifulSoup.

Fix:
Call the method to get the content:

Before:
```python
xml = self.news.read # Incorrect
sp = BeautifulSoup(xml, parser)
```

After:
```python
xml = self.news.read() # Correct
sp = BeautifulSoup(xml, parser)
```

Improvement:
Check if `xml` is a string before passing it:
```python
xml = self.news.read()
if not isinstance(xml, str):
    raise TypeError("Expected a string for BeautifulSoup markup")
sp = BeautifulSoup(xml, parser)
```

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[Leonard Richardson (leonardr)]

The previous comment is unhelpful spam generated by an LLM. I don't have a way to report this so I'm making a note in the issue itself.