Importing '__future__. unicode_literals' causes TypeError in 'graph_from_place'

[orome]

Problem description

After following the instructions for installation of OSMnx (including explicitly installing spatialindex ) with

brew install spatialindex
pip install osmnx

running the very first basic example of

import osmnx as ox
G = ox.graph_from_place('Manhattan Island, New York City, New York, USA', network_type='drive')
ox.plot_graph(ox.project_graph(G))

in the project's readme, I get

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/Rax/Documents/Projects/Coding/Python/maps/test.py", line 23, in <module>
    G = ox.graph_from_place('Manhattan Island, New York City, New York, USA', network_type='drive')
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/osmnx/core.py", line 1850, in graph_from_place
    raise TypeError('query must be a string or a list of query strings')
TypeError: query must be a string or a list of query strings

What operating system, architecture, Python version, and OSMnx version are you using?

macOS: 10.13.6 (17G65)
Python: 2.7.15
OSMnx: 0.8.1

Possible cause

I routinely begin my Python 2.7 code with

from __future__ import (absolute_import, print_function, division, unicode_literals)

and removing unicode_literals fixes the problem.

[gboeing]

OSMnx is compatible with Python 2 and 3, so you don't need to import from the future package to use it. If you use Python 2 and import unicode_literals from future, all of your strings will be of type unicode instead. As you can see in the documentation, graph_from_place expects the query to be of type string, not of type unicode.