'str' object has no attribute 'decode' in Python3

Question

I've some problem with "decode" method in python 3.3.4. This is my code:

for lines in open('file','r'):
    decodedLine = lines.decode('ISO-8859-1')
    line = decodedLine.split('\t')

But I can't decode the line for this problem:

AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'decode'

Do you have any ideas? Thanks

Answer 1

One encodes strings, and one decodes bytes.

You should read bytes from the file and decode them:

for lines in open('file','rb'):
    decodedLine = lines.decode('ISO-8859-1')
    line = decodedLine.split('\t')

Luckily open has an encoding argument which makes this easy:

for decodedLine in open('file', 'r', encoding='ISO-8859-1'):
    line = decodedLine.split('\t')

Answer 2

open already decodes to Unicode in Python 3 if you open in text mode. If you want to open it as bytes, so that you can then decode, you need to open with mode 'rb'.