TypeError: compile() expected string without null bytes

I am trying to translate a string using google translate API.

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-


import sys
import urllib
import urllib2

import ast


url = 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/language/translate?v=1.0&q='+urllib.quote(' '.join(sys.argv[3:]))                   +'&langpair='+sys.argv[1]+'%7C'+sys.argv[2] 
print url

transtext =urllib2.urlopen(urllib2.Request(url)).read()
content=ast.literal_eval(transtext)

print  content['responseData']['translatedText']

python testURL.py hi en 'नमस्ते'

this is the url given .

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/language/translate?v=1.0&q=%E0%A4%A8%E0%A4%AE%E0%A4%B8%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%A4%E0%A5%87&langpair=hi%7Cen If we check the above url we can see the Output is Hello

{"responseData": {"translatedText":"Hello"}, "responseDetails": null, "responseStatus": 200}

this is in string format so im trying to convert it to dictionary format using ast.literal_eval and then acess the data in dictionary by content['responseData']['translatedText'] but following error occurs

Error:

    content=ast.literal_eval(transtext)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/ast.py", line 49, in lit开发者_运维技巧eral_eval
    node_or_string = parse(node_or_string, mode='eval')
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/ast.py", line 37, in parse
    return compile(expr, filename, mode, PyCF_ONLY_AST)
TypeError: compile() expected string without null bytes

python version 2.6 and OS Ubuntu 9.10

The response you get are likely in JSON format. Try using the json module, which is included with Python 2.6.

literal_eval expects Python representations, which don't include null. It's JSON, so use json.loads(transtext)