[FIXED] 'str' object has no attribute 'decode' in Python 3

Issue

I've some problem with decode method in python 3.3.4. This is my code:

for line in open('file','r'):
    decodedLine = line.decode('ISO-8859-1')
    line = decodedLine.split('\t')

But I can't decode the line for this problem:

AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'decode'

Do you have any ideas? Thanks

Solution

One encodes strings, and one decodes bytes.

You should read bytes from the file and decode them:

for lines in open('file','rb'):
    decodedLine = lines.decode('ISO-8859-1')
    line = decodedLine.split('\t')

Luckily open has an encoding argument which makes this easy:

for decodedLine in open('file', 'r', encoding='ISO-8859-1'):
    line = decodedLine.split('\t')

Answered By - Veedrac