Open file in text mode: open(<file>, 'rt')

[gregpalmr]

Currently the open() method opens the file in "byte" mode which causes the following error, when you try to run an iterator over the file contents:

 Error: iterator should return strings, not bytes (did you open the file in text mode?)

It would be very useful to allow the caller to specify that the file be open in "text" mode so that the following code would work without error:

import sys
import alluxio
from alluxio import option
import csv

with alluxio_client.open('/tmp/customers.csv', 'rt') as alluxio_file:
    csvreader = csv.reader(alluxio_file, delimiter=',', quotechar='|')
    for row in csvreader:
        print (', '.join(row))

[psolomin]

@gregpalmr will this approach work for your case?

import codecs
import csv

from alluxio import Client

c = Client(host=..., port=39999)

with c.open("/test.csv", "w") as f:
   f.write("1,2\n")

with c.open("/test.csv", "r") as alluxio_file:
    rdr = csv.reader(codecs.iterdecode(alluxio_file, 'utf-8'), delimiter=',')
    for row in rdr:
        print(', '.join(row))

# prints out 1, 2