csv Error iterator should return strings not bytes

Question

Sample csv contains the following   NAME    Id   No  Dept Tom     1    12   CS Hendry  2    35   EC Bahamas 3    21   IT Frank   4    61   EE   And the Python file contains the following code   import csv ifile    open  sample csv    rb   read   csv reader ifile  for row in read       print  row     When I run the above code in Python  I get the following exception      File  csvformat py   line 4  in        for row in read      csv Error  iterator should return strings  not bytes  did you open the file in text mode     How can I fix it

User · Answer

In Python3  csv reader expects  that passed iterable returns strings  not bytes  Here is one more solution to this problem  that uses codecs module   import csv import codecs ifile    open  sample csv    rb   read   csv reader codecs iterdecode ifile   utf-8    for row in read       print  row

User · Answer

You open the file in text mode   More specifically    ifile    open  sample csv    rt   encoding  lt theencodingofthefile gt     Good guesses for encoding is  ascii  and  utf8   You can also leave the encoding off  and it will use the system default encoding  which tends to be UTF8  but may be something else

User · Answer

The reason it is throwing that exception is because you have the argument rb  which opens the file in binary mode  Change that to r  which will by default open the file in text mode  Your code  import csv ifile    open  sample csv    quot rb quot   read   csv reader ifile  for row in read       print  row    New code  import csv ifile    open  sample csv    quot r quot   read   csv reader ifile  for row in read       print  row

User · Answer

Your problem is you have the b in the open flag   The flag rt  read  text  is the default  so  using the context manager  simply do this   with open  sample csv   as ifile      read   csv reader ifile       for row in read          print  row      The context manager means you don t need generic error handling  without which you may get stuck with the file open  especially in an interpreter   because it will automatically close the file on an error  or on exiting the context   The above is the same as   with open  sample csv    r   as ifile            or    with open  sample csv    rt   as ifile

User · Answer

I had this error when running an old python script developped with Python 2 6 4  When updating to 3 6 2  I had to remove all  rb  parameters from open calls in order to fix this csv reading error

[python] csv.Error: iterator should return strings, not bytes

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