Remove 'b' flag in CSV output

Question

I am trying to write the outputs to a CSV file in Python 3.4 but the CSV file always contains 'b' flags. For example, b'The text output1', b'The text output2',... I am wondering if there is a way to get rid of the 'b' flags. I understand that this is not an issue in Python 2.X.

Here are the codes that I used

with open('test.csv', 'w') as f:
    writer = csv.DictWriter(f, ['field'], extrasaction='ignore')
    writer.writeheader()
    test_text = mongo.test.find({'text': text})
    for t in test_text
        writer.writerow({i:v.encode('utf') for i,v in t.items()})

Thanks very much

------Updates-----------

Thanks very much for Tim Pietzcker, John Zwinck, and Warren Weckesser providing helpful comments and answers. Per Warren's suggestions, if I change my codes to

import csv

data = [chr(0x03d5) + 'oo', 'b' + chr(0x0101) + 'r']

with open('test.csv', 'w') as f:
    writer = csv.writer(f)
    for item in data:
        writer.writerow([item])

I will get error message

UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u03d5' in position 0: character maps to <undefined>

if I change my codes to

import csv

data = [chr(0x03d5) + 'oo', 'b' + chr(0x0101) + 'r']

with open('test.csv', 'w') as f:
    writer = csv.writer(f)
    for item in data:
        writer.writerow([item.encode('utf')])

I will get outputs with 'b' flags

b'\xcf\x95oo'
b'b\xc4\x81r'

Any thoughts on how this is happening and how I might be able to fix it? Thanks again.

------Updates 2-----------

Thanks very much for Warren's solution. The following codes worked!

import csv

data = [chr(0x03d5) + 'oo', 'b' + chr(0x0101) + 'r']

with open('test.csv', 'w', encoding='utf8') as f:
    writer = csv.writer(f)
    for item in data:
        writer.writerow([item])

Answer 1

Don't explicitly encode the strings yourself; let the writer take care of it. For example, this code:

import csv

data = [chr(0x03d5) + 'oo', 'b' + chr(0x0101) + 'r']

with open('test.csv', 'w') as f:
    writer = csv.writer(f)
    for item in data:
        writer.writerow([item])

writes the file

ϕoo
bār

with UTF-8 encoding (at least it does on my system, where locale.getpreferredencoding(False) returns 'UTF-8'). To make the encoding explicit, you can set the encoding in the call to open:

    with open('test.csv', 'w', encoding='utf8') as f:

If the last line is changed to writer.writerow([item.encode('utf')]) (which converts the strings to bytes), it produces

b'\xcf\x95oo'
b'b\xc4\x81r'

In your example, try changing this line:

        writer.writerow({i:v.encode('utf') for i,v in t.items()})

to this:

        writer.writerow(t)

Then if that works, you could replace this:

    for t in test_text
        writer.writerow({i:v.encode('utf') for i,v in t.items()})

with

    writer.writerows(test_text)