AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'maketrans'

Question

I've been doing some previous research about this error. There are some explanations here in StackOverflow related, the solutions suggested are quite unrelated though.

When I try to import Gtk from gi.repository, it crashes with the following output:
bash-4.2$ python3 Python 3.2 (r32:88445, Feb 21 2011, 21:11:06) [GCC 4.6.0 20110212 (Red Hat 4.6.0-0.7)] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

>>> from gi.repository import Gtk

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/usr/lib64/python3.2/site-packages/gi/importer.py", line 76, in load_module  
dynamic_module._load()
File "/usr/lib64/python3.2/site-packages/gi/module.py", line 251, in _load
overrides_modules = __import__('gi.overrides', fromlist=[self._namespace])
File "/usr/lib64/python3.2/site-packages/gi/overrides/Gtk.py", line 400, in <module>
class MessageDialog(Gtk.MessageDialog, Dialog):
File "/usr/lib64/python3.2/site-packages/gi/overrides/Gtk.py", line 404, in   
MessageDialog
type=Gtk.MessageType.INFO,
File "/usr/lib64/python3.2/site-packages/gi/module.py", line 127, in __getattr__
ascii_upper_trans = string.maketrans(
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'maketrans' 

Since this is an import straight from python console and not by executing a python file script I don't even have a clue how to handle this.

Answer 1

Ok, I managed to get it work. Despite is a dirty workaround:

I modified /usr/lib64/python3.2/site-packages/gi/module.py

in line 127 I replaced string.maketrans with str.maketrans so it complies with python 3 docs.

Hope to be helpful for anyone in my circumstances.

Hugo

Answer 2

I was trying to run string.maketrans using Jupyter notebook and it the error message:

the module string has no attribute maketrans.

Changing the code to str.maketrans did the trick. It must be noted however that I did not have to make any changes to the:

/usr/lib64/python3.2/site-packages/gi/module.py

Answer 3

This seems to be a known bug bug737375 and it was fixed (almost like Hugo own solution).

You can find the fix in the master branch of the pygopbject repository here:
http://git.gnome.org/browse/pygobject/commit/?id=8f89ff24fcac627ce15ca93038711fded1a7c5ed

Anyway I'll rewrite here what's in the diff, so maybe I'll save you some time :)

From the file: /usr/lib64/python3.2/site-packages/gi/module.py

You should replace:

import string

with:

try:
    maketrans = ''.maketrans
except AttributeError:
    # fallback for Python 2
    from string import maketrans

And again replace (around line 130):

ascii_upper_trans = string.maketrans(

with:

ascii_upper_trans = maketrans(