Name 'unicode' is not defined in Python 3

[waleedka]

I'm getting this error when I call loadRes() with Python 3.5. Python 3 replaced unicode with str.

coco_results = coco_val.loadRes(results)

This is the stack trace:

/usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/pycocotools/coco.py in loadRes(self, resFile)
    301         print('Loading and preparing results...')
    302         tic = time.time()
--> 303         if type(resFile) == str or type(resFile) == unicode:
    304             anns = json.load(open(resFile))
    305         elif type(resFile) == np.ndarray:

NameError: name 'unicode' is not defined

[RubensZimbres]

Alter line 308 of coco.py at pycocotools library directory, from:
if type(resFile) == str or type(resFile) == unicode:
to:
if type(resFile) == str or type(resFile) == bytes:
Works perfectly for Python 3

[waleedka]

Thanks, but I already submitted a pull request to fix this. Looking at the date, it's been a year now and the PR has not been merged. I ended up forking the repo and I'm using my forked version in all future work.

[gael-vanderlee]

Just ran into this problem, pls fix

[martin-gorner]

same here. Pycocotools does not seem to be Python 3 compatible.

[luxedo]

In a quick search I found that there's at least 5 PRs that should solve this issue.

• Fix loadRes() to work with both Python 2 and 3. #50
• fix unicode error in python3 #280
• Define ‘unicode’ in Python 3 #145
• added which condition for python3 #128
• Define unicode for Python 3 #108

[tgandor]

This is fixed on master, but not on PyPI (e.g. detectron2 sugests to install like:
pip install -U 'git+https://github.com/cocodataset/cocoapi.git#subdirectory=PythonAPI').
Hey, Authors! How about:

• adding a versioning scheme, like pycocotools.__version__, e.g. '2.0.1'
• publishing the new version on PyPI
  ?

[almajeas]

Is there a new direction by the authors to refer python3 compatibility issues to a different source? or should we just wait and hope the pullrequesets go through eventually?