HTTPResponse object -- JSON object must be str, not 'bytes'

I've been trying to update a small Python library called libpynexmo to work with Python 3.

I've been stuck on this function:

def send_request_json(self, request):
    url = request
    req =  urllib.request.Request(url=url)
    req.add_header('Accept', 'application/json')
    try:
        return json.load(urllib.request.urlopen(req))
    except ValueError:
        return False

When it gets to this, json responds with:

TypeError: the JSON object must be str, not 'bytes'

I read in a few places that for json.load you should pass objects (In this case an HTTPResponse object) with a .read() attached, but it doesn't work on HTTPResponse objects.

I'm at a loss as to where to go with this next, but being that my entire 1500 line script is freshly converted to Python 3, I don't feel like going back to 2.7.

Solution

I recently wrote a small function to send Nexmo messages. Unless you need the full functionality of the libpynexmo code, this should do the job for you. And if you want to continue overhauling libpynexmo, just copy this code. The key is utf8 encoding.

If you want to send any other fields with your message, the full documentation for what you can include with a nexmo outbound message is here

Python 3.4 tested Nexmo outbound (JSON):

def nexmo_sendsms(api_key, api_secret, sender, receiver, body):
    """
    Sends a message using Nexmo.

    :param api_key: Nexmo provided api key
    :param api_secret: Nexmo provided secrety key
    :param sender: The number used to send the message
    :param receiver: The number the message is addressed to
    :param body: The message body
    :return: Returns the msgid received back from Nexmo after message has been sent.
    """


    msg = {
        'api_key': api_key,
        'api_secret': api_secret,
        'from': sender,
        'to': receiver,
        'text': body
    }
    nexmo_url = 'https://rest.nexmo.com/sms/json'
    data = urllib.parse.urlencode(msg)
    binary_data = data.encode('utf8')
    req = urllib.request.Request(nexmo_url, binary_data)
    response = urllib.request.urlopen(req)
    result = json.loads(response.readall().decode('utf-8'))
    return result['messages'][0]['message-id']