Error when reading csv: coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer

Question

I am receiving the following error when I am reading a csv file in my Django project.

coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer, file found

I have searched the forum already, but could not find a solution to my problem. I also have no idea how to solve this. When I run this code locally I don't have the problem. Once I execute the script from my django views I get the error from above.

coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer, file found

import os
from django.conf import settings

path = os.path.join(settings.BASE_DIR, 'technicalAnalalysis/EUR_USD')

def index(request):

    return render(request, 'technicalAnalysis/home.html')



class carouselData(APIView):

    authentication_classes = []
    permission_classes = []

    def get(self, request, format=None):

        import csv

        EUR_USD_closeBid = []

        with open(path) as csvfile:

            readCSV = csv.reader(open(csvfile), delimiter=str(',').encode('utf-8'), )

            for row in readCSV:

                closeBid = row[0]

                BOP = row[12] 

                EUR_USD_closeBid.append(closeBid)

        data = {
            "EUR_USD_closeBid":EUR_USD_closeBid,

            }

        return Response(data)            

this is how the csv was created

master.to_csv(eachCurrency, encoding='utf-8', index=False)

and this how the csv data looks like

1.4551,2016-08-25T21:00:00.000000Z,1.46613370302,1.4588,1.45146629698,19.2623252118,16.0468541889,18.0294990319,52.3305843166,-0.000955558790503,0.00497888833433,0.00402332954383,-0.228110599078
1.45557,2016-08-28T21:00:00.000000Z,1.46022799941,1.45683,1.45343200059,18.3020335848,15.2573095743,17.1424034245,52.7163692506,-0.00105527020367,0.00471507078342,0.00365980057975,0.655172413793
1.45919,2016-08-29T21:00:00.000000Z,1.459965965,1.456766,1.453566035,17.7461955078,14.6233407849,18.0619294336,55.6907414516,-0.000874414835166,0.00449646707462,0.00362205223946,0.82183908046

Thanks a lot in advance and kind regards

Answer 1

You are opening the csv file twice. Remove the open() from this line:

readCSV = csv.reader(open(csvfile), delimiter=str(',').encode('utf-8'), )

to

readCSV = csv.reader(csvfile, delimiter=str(',').encode('utf-8'))

Answer 2

You've already opened the file. You should read the file into memory then parse it with the csv library.

Otherwise, you can use csv.reader instead, so you can skip opening the file and let the library handle it for you.

Answer 3

Perhaps csv.DictReader might also be helpful here. So for example:

with open(path) as f:
     data = list(csv.DictReader(f))