Python 2.7 and Textblob - TypeError: The `text` argument passed to `__init__(text)` must be a string, not <type 'list'>

Question

Update: Issue resolved. (see comment section below.) Ultimately, the following two lines were required to transform my .csv to unicode and utilize TextBlob: row = [cell.decode('utf-8') for cell in row], and text = ' '.join(row).

Original question: I am trying to use a Python library called Textblob to analyze text from a .csv file. Error I receive when I call Textblob in my code is:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:\Users\Marcus\Documents\Blog\Python\Scripts\Brooks\textblob_sentiment.py", line 30, in blob = TextBlob(row) File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\textblob\blob.py", line 344, in init 'must be a string, not {0}'.format(type(text)))TypeError: The text argument passed to __init__(text) must be a string, not

My code is:

#from __future__ import division, unicode_literals #(This was recommended for Python 2.x, but didn't help in my case.)

#-*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import csv
from textblob import TextBlob
with open(u'items.csv', 'rb') as scrape_file:
reader = csv.reader(scrape_file, delimiter=',', quotechar='"')
for row in reader:
    row = [unicode(cell, 'utf-8') for cell in row]
    print row
    blob = TextBlob(row)
    print type(blob)

I have been working through UTF/unicode issues. I'd originally had a different subject which I posed to this thread. (Since my code and the error have changed, I'm posting to a new thread.) Print statements indicate that the variable "row" is of type=str, which I thought indicated that the reader object had been transformed as required by Textblob. The source .csv file is saved as UTF-8. Can anyone provide feedback as to how I can get unblocked on this, and the flaws in my code?
Thanks so much for the help.

Answer 1

So maybe you can make change as below:

row = str([cell.encode('utf-8') for cell in row])