How to write raw bytes to Google cloud storage with GAE's Python API

Question

I am trying to modify some binary data submitted by user form, and write it to Google Cloud Storage. I tried to follow Google document's example, but upon writing I got errors such as:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe5 in position 34: ordinal not in range.

My code is simply as below

gcs_file = gcs.open(filename,'w',content_type='audio/mp3')
gcs_file.write(buf)
gcs_file.close()

I tried to open file with 'wb' mode but got a "Invalid mode wb." error.

I found a similar question at GCS's maillist which was on Java. There the GCS develop team's suggest was to use writeChannel.write() instead of PrintWriter. Could anybody suggest how to make it work in Python?

Answer 1

I suppose the problem is that gcs_file.write() method expects data of type "str". Since type of your buf is "unicode" and apparently contains some Unicode chars (maybe in ID3 tags), you get UnicodeDecodeError. So you just need to encode buf to UTF-8:

gcs_file = gcs.open(filename,'w',content_type='audio/mp3')
gcs_file.write(buf.encode('utf-8'))
gcs_file.close()