Couldn't find foreign struct converter for 'cairo.Context'

Question

It's me again. This is a code related to a project I'm doing called Sentiment Analysis on Twitter Data. The following code is basically used to display the number of positive and negative tweets in which I'm getting the error given below.

from pyspark import SparkConf, SparkContext
from pyspark.streaming import StreamingContext
from pyspark.streaming.kafka import KafkaUtils
import operator
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt


def main():
        conf = SparkConf().setMaster("local[2]").setAppName("Streamer")
        sc = SparkContext(conf=conf)

        # Creating a streaming context with batch interval of 10 sec
        ssc = StreamingContext(sc, 10)
        ssc.checkpoint("checkpoint")
        pwords = load_wordlist("positive.txt")
        nwords = load_wordlist("negative.txt")
        counts = stream(ssc, pwords, nwords, 100)
        make_plot(counts)


def make_plot(counts):
        """
        This function plots the counts of positive and negative words for each timestep.
        """
        positiveCounts = []
        negativeCounts = []
        time = []

        for val in counts:
        positiveTuple = val[0]
        positiveCounts.append(positiveTuple[1])
        negativeTuple = val[1]
        negativeCounts.append(negativeTuple[1])

        for i in range(len(counts)):
        time.append(i)

        posLine = plt.plot(time, positiveCounts,'bo-', label='Positive')
        negLine = plt.plot(time, negativeCounts,'go-', label='Negative')
        plt.axis([0, len(counts), 0, max(max(positiveCounts), max(negativeCounts))+50])
        plt.xlabel('Time step')
        plt.ylabel('Word count')
        plt.legend(loc = 'upper left')
    plt.show()


def load_wordlist(filename):
    """ 
    This function returns a list or set of words from the given filename.
    """ 
    words = {}
    f = open(filename, 'rU')
    text = f.read()
    text = text.split('\n')
    for line in text:
        words[line] = 1
    f.close()
    return words


def wordSentiment(word,pwords,nwords):
    if word in pwords:
    return ('positive', 1)
    elif word in nwords:
    return ('negative', 1)


def updateFunction(newValues, runningCount):
    if runningCount is None:
       runningCount = 0
    return sum(newValues, runningCount) 


def sendRecord(record):
    connection = createNewConnection()
    connection.send(record)
    connection.close()


def stream(ssc, pwords, nwords, duration):
    kstream = KafkaUtils.createDirectStream(
    ssc, topics = ['twitterstream'], kafkaParams = {"metadata.broker.list": 'localhost:9092'})
    tweets = kstream.map(lambda x: x[1].encode("ascii", "ignore"))

    # Each element of tweets will be the text of a tweet.
    # We keep track of a running total counts and print it at every time step.
    words = tweets.flatMap(lambda line:line.split(" "))
    positive = words.map(lambda word: ('Positive', 1) if word in pwords else ('Positive', 0))
    negative = words.map(lambda word: ('Negative', 1) if word in nwords else ('Negative', 0))
    allSentiments = positive.union(negative)
    sentimentCounts = allSentiments.reduceByKey(lambda x,y: x+y)
    runningSentimentCounts = sentimentCounts.updateStateByKey(updateFunction)
    runningSentimentCounts.pprint()

    # The counts variable hold the word counts for all time steps
    counts = []
    sentimentCounts.foreachRDD(lambda t, rdd: counts.append(rdd.collect()))

    # Start the computation
    ssc.start() 
    ssc.awaitTerminationOrTimeout(duration)
    ssc.stop(stopGraceFully = True)

    return counts


if __name__=="__main__":
    main()

The error happens to be as follows:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/matplotlib/backends/backend_gtk3.py", line 343, in idle_draw
    self.draw()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/matplotlib/backends/backend_gtk3.py", line 336, in draw
    self.get_property("window").process_updates (False)
TypeError: Couldn't find foreign struct converter for 'cairo.Context'

Answer 1

In my case, python3-gi-cairo is already installed but possibly broken. So if anyone meets this case, you simply can add --reinstall in the apt install.

sudo apt install --reinstall python3-gi-cairo

Reinstall here won't break your system as when you remove (all dependants will be removed too) then installing it again.

Answer 2

See this Github discussion. For example try:

sudo apt-get install python-gi-cairo

Answer 3

replying to above comment, 3 year forward (I'm using WSL 2 and VSCode, and X-server for GUI applications), you should use

sudo apt install python3-gi-cairo

and you are saved the hassle of changings backends.

Answer 4

The problem here is matplotlib's backend GTK3. I recommend changing it to a backend that just works for you. See https://matplotlib.org/faq/usage_faq.html

I usually do

import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('Agg')

before any import related to matplotlib. You won't be able to see the figure but you can save it with savefig() and then open it with your image viewer.