GCS - Read a text file from Google Cloud Storage directly into python

Question

I feel kind of stupid right now. I have been reading numerous documentations and stackoverflow questions but I can't get it right.

I have a file on Google Cloud Storage. It is in a bucket 'test_bucket'. Inside this bucket there is a folder, 'temp_files_folder', which contains two files, one .txt file named 'test.txt' and one .csv file named 'test.csv'. The two files are simply because I try using both but the result is the same either way.

The content in the files is

hej san 

and I am hoping to read it into python the same way I would do on a local with

textfile = open("/file_path/test.txt", 'r') times = textfile.read().splitlines() textfile.close() print(times) 

which gives

['hej', 'san'] 

I have tried using

from google.cloud import storage  client = storage.Client()  bucket = client.get_bucket('test_bucket')  blob = bucket.get_blob('temp_files_folder/test.txt')  print(blob.download_as_string) 

but it gives the output

<bound method Blob.download_as_string of <Blob: test_bucket, temp_files_folder/test.txt>> 

How can I get the actual string(s) in the file?

Answer 1

download_as_string is a method, you need to call it.

print(blob.download_as_string()) 

More likely, you want to assign it to a variable so that you download it once and can then print it and do whatever else you want with it:

downloaded_blob = blob.download_as_string() print(downloaded_blob) do_something_else(downloaded_blob) 

Answer 2

The method 'download_as_string()' will read in the content as byte.

Find below an example to process a .csv file.

import csv from io import StringIO  from google.cloud import storage  storage_client = storage.Client() bucket = storage_client.get_bucket(YOUR_BUCKET_NAME)  blob = bucket.blob(YOUR_FILE_NAME) blob = blob.download_as_string() blob = blob.decode('utf-8')  blob = StringIO(blob)  #tranform bytes to string here  names = csv.reader(blob)  #then use csv library to read the content for name in names:     print(f"First Name: {name[0]}")