'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\')         


        

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')