Gmail API error from sample code - requires an object with a byte, not 'str'

Question

I am including the Gmail API in the program that I am creating and I get an error that I could not solve / that I could not find the answer on the Internet. Below is the relevant code, as well as the error:

from apiclient import discovery from httplib2 import Http from oauth2client import file, client, tools import base64 from email.mime.audio import MIMEAudio from email.mime.base import MIMEBase from email.mime.image import MIMEImage from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart from email.mime.text import MIMEText import mimetypes import os def create_message(sender, to, subject, message_text): message = MIMEText(message_text) message['to'] = to message['from'] = sender message['subject'] = subject return {'raw': base64.urlsafe_b64encode(message.as_string())} def send_message(service, user_id, message): message = (service.users().messages().send(userId=user_id, body=message).execute()) print('Message Id: %s' % message['id']) return message def send_email(orders): SCOPES = 'https://mail.google.com/' store = file.Storage('gmail.json') creds = store.get() if not creds or creds.invalid: flow = client.flow_from_clientsecrets('client_secret.json', SCOPES) creds = tools.run_flow(flow, store) service = discovery.build('gmail','v1',http=creds.authorize(Http())) message_text = orders[0] created_message = create_message('from','to','subject', message_text) send_message(service, 'from', created_message) send_email(['TEST']) Traceback (most recent call last): File "test_email.py", line 50, in <module> schoolPing(['TEST']) File "test_email.py", line 47, in schoolPing created_message = create_message('from','to','subject', message_text) File "test_email.py", line 27, in create_message return {'raw': base64.urlsafe_b64encode(message.as_string())} File "/Users/Andre/anaconda/lib/python3.5/base64.py", line 119, in urlsafe_b64encode return b64encode(s).translate(_urlsafe_encode_translation) File "/Users/Andre/anaconda/lib/python3.5/base64.py", line 59, in b64encode encoded = binascii.b2a_base64(s)[:-1] TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str' 

Answer 1

Found solution, replace this line:

 return {'raw': base64.urlsafe_b64encode(message.as_string())} 

with:

 return {'raw': base64.urlsafe_b64encode(message.as_string().encode()).decode()} 

Note: .encode () and .decode () calls have been added.

First, the str object is encoded into a byte object - base64.urlsafe_b64encode requires it in Python 3 (compared to the str object in Python 2).

Then the base64 encoded object must be decoded back to str. This is necessary since the googleapiclient library will try to execute json serialize later in the code, and this is not possible for byte objects.