TypeError: the JSON object must be str, bytes or bytearray, not NoneType (while Using googletrans API)

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I'm trying to translate a yml file using the googletrans API. This is my code:

#Import
from googletrans import Translator
import re

# API
translator = Translator()

# Counter
counter_DoNotTranslate = 0
counter_Translate = 0

#Translater
with open("ValuesfileNotTranslatedTest.yml") as a_file: #Values file not translated
  for object in a_file:
    stripped_object = object.rstrip()
    found = False
    file = open("ValuesfileTranslated.yml", "a") #Translated file
    if "# Do not translate" in stripped_object: #Dont translate lines with "#"
      counter_DoNotTranslate += 1
      file.writelines(stripped_object + "\n")
    else: #Translates english to dutch and appends
      counter_Translate += 1
      results = translator.translate(stripped_object, src='en', dest='nl')
      translatedText = results.text
      file.writelines(re.split('|=', translatedText, maxsplit=1)[-1].strip() + "\n" )

#Print
print("# Do not translate found: " + str(counter_DoNotTranslate))
print("Words translated: " + str(counter_Translate))

This is the yml file I want to translate:

'Enter a section title'
'Enter a description of the section. This will also be shown on the course details page'

'Title'
'Description'
'Start date'
'End date'
Published
Section is optional
Close discussions?



'Enter a title'

But when I try to run the code I get the following error:

File "/Users/AndreB/Library/Python/3.9/lib/python/site-packages/googletrans/client.py", line 219, in translate
    parsed = json.loads(data[0][2])
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.9/lib/python3.9/json/__init__.py", line 339, in loads
    raise TypeError(f'the JSON object must be str, bytes or bytearray, '
TypeError: the JSON object must be str, bytes or bytearray, not NoneType

I think the problem is that there are different whitespaces in the yml file, so I tried adding

if stripped_object is None: #This would skip the lines in the yaml file where there are whitespaces
      file.writelines(stripped_object + "\n")

to the code. But I still get the same error message.

Does anyone have an idea how I can fix this?

google-translation-api yaml python
1 Answers

There are quite a lot of problems with the code you present, none of which is causing the problem. The problem is, indeed, likely caused by blank lines in the yml file, but your test is incorrect:

"" is None # False
" " is None # also False
not "" # True
not " " # False
not " ".strip() # True

So the correct way to test for a line consisting of zero or more whitespace chars is to take the truthiness of line.strip(). In this case your gate would be:

if not line.strip():
    out.write("\n")

Which brings me to the other problems with this code:

  • your variable names shadow internal names (object, file)
  • you open the output file for every line in the input file (and never close it) despite correctly using a context manager in the first case
  • your variable names mix conventions (snake_case and camelCase)

Here's a draft of what a function might look like which avoids these problems:

from pathlib import Path
from googletrans import Translator

translator = Translator()

def translate_file(infn: str | Path, outfn: str | Path, src="en", dest="dl") -> Tuple[int, int]:
    inf = Path(infn)
    outf = Path(outfn)
    translated = 0
    skipped = 0
    
    with infn.open() as inf, outfn.open("w") as outf:
        for line in inf:
            if not line.strip():
                outf.write("\n")
            elif "# Do not translate" in line:
                outf.write(line)
                skipped += 1
            else:
                outf.write(translate.translate(line, src=src, dest=dest))
                translated += 1

    return translated, skipped

There are other things you doubtless want to do, and I don't understand your code to handle the response from translate.translate() (doubtless because I have never used the library).

Note that if you do actually want to translate real yml, you would be much better first parsing it, then translating the bits of the tree which need translating, and then dumping it back to disk. Working line by line is going to break sooner or later with valid syntax which doesn't work linewise.

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