TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str' in python and CSV

Question

TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not ‘str’

I’m getting the above error while executing the below python code to save the HTML table data in a CSV file. How do I get rid of that error?

import csv
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url='http://www.mapsofindia.com/districts-india/'
response=requests.get(url)
html=response.content

soup=BeautifulSoup(html,'html.parser')
table=soup.find('table', attrs={'class':'tableizer-table'})
list_of_rows=[]
for row in table.findAll('tr')[1:]:
    list_of_cells=[]
    for cell in row.findAll('td'):
        list_of_cells.append(cell.text)
    list_of_rows.append(list_of_cells)
outfile=open('./immates.csv','wb')
writer=csv.writer(outfile)
writer.writerow(["SNo", "States", "Dist", "Population"])
writer.writerows(list_of_rows)

Asked By: ShivaGuntuku

||

Source

Answer 1

You are using Python 2 methodology instead of Python 3.

Change:

outfile=open('./immates.csv','wb')

To:

outfile=open('./immates.csv','w')

and you will get a file with the following output:

SNo,States,Dist,Population
1,Andhra Pradesh,13,49378776
2,Arunachal Pradesh,16,1382611
3,Assam,27,31169272
4,Bihar,38,103804637
5,Chhattisgarh,19,25540196
6,Goa,2,1457723
7,Gujarat,26,60383628
.....

In Python 3 csv takes the input in text mode, whereas in Python 2 it took it in binary mode.

Edited to Add

Here is the code I ran:

url='http://www.mapsofindia.com/districts-india/'
html = urllib.request.urlopen(url).read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
table=soup.find('table', attrs={'class':'tableizer-table'})
list_of_rows=[]
for row in table.findAll('tr')[1:]:
    list_of_cells=[]
    for cell in row.findAll('td'):
        list_of_cells.append(cell.text)
    list_of_rows.append(list_of_cells)
outfile = open('./immates.csv','w')
writer=csv.writer(outfile)
writer.writerow(['SNo', 'States', 'Dist', 'Population'])
writer.writerows(list_of_rows)

Answered By: dstudeba

Answer 2

I had the same issue with Python3.
My code was writing into io.BytesIO().

Replacing with io.StringIO() solved.

Answered By: vinyll

Answer 3

file = open('parsed_data.txt', 'w')
for link in soup.findAll('a', attrs={'href': re.compile("^http")}): print (link)
soup_link = str(link)
print (soup_link)
file.write(soup_link)
file.flush()
file.close()

In my case, I used BeautifulSoup to write a .txt with Python 3.x. It had the same issue. Just as @tsduteba said, change the ‘wb’ in the first line to ‘w’.

Answered By: Yang Li

Answer 4

just change wb to w

outfile=open('./immates.csv','wb')

to

outfile=open('./immates.csv','w')

Answered By: Sarath Ak

Answer 5

You are opening the csv file in binary mode, it should be 'w'

import csv

# open csv file in write mode with utf-8 encoding
with open('output.csv','w',encoding='utf-8',newline='')as w:
    fieldnames = ["SNo", "States", "Dist", "Population"]
    writer = csv.DictWriter(w, fieldnames=fieldnames)
    # write list of dicts
    writer.writerows(list_of_dicts) #writerow(dict) if write one row at time

Answered By: Sohan Das

TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str' in python and CSV

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