TypeError: decoding str is not supported (Python 3.4)

Question

I am receiving a strange error when trying to turn a bytes object into a string:

    Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/Scraper_v1.0.py", line 149, in <module>
    rawjsonstr = str(rawjsonstr, 'utf-16')
TypeError: decoding str is not supported

My code is as follows:

# preparing string
            try:
                rawjsonstr = "".join(rawjson[3]).encode('utf-16')  # used to select the correct text/javascript node
            except IndexError:
                errorcount += 1
                with open(filepath, "at") as f:
                    write = csv.writer(f)
                    write.writerow(["Error: no valid JSON found",
                                    statenum,
                                    statesubnum,
                                    suburbnum,
                                    listingnum,
                                    listingsurlstr])
            pass

            rmvlist = ["var digitalData = ",
                        "var titanEnabled = true;",
                        "titan = titan || {};",
                        "// enable the command queue to allow spa execution in the correct order",
                        "titan.cmd = titan.cmd || [];"]

            rawjsonstr = str(rawjsonstr, 'utf-16')

Edit

Re-ran the above code without encoding/decoding. Now receive the following error on the same loop.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/isaac/PycharmProjects/ResidentialData/AllHomesScraper_v1.0.py", line 162, in <module>
    jsondata = json.loads(rawjsonstr)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.4/json/__init__.py", line 318, in loads
    return _default_decoder.decode(s)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.4/json/decoder.py", line 343, in decode
    obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.4/json/decoder.py", line 359, in raw_decode
    obj, end = self.scan_once(s, idx)
ValueError: Expecting ',' delimiter: line 1 column 1033 (char 1032)

I will re-run it and capture the string that is causing this failure (looks like it's just incorrectly formatted JSON data).

Answer 1

The error was being caused as a result of the program trying to parse an invalid JSON string: JSON formatter

Solution: Catch the error and append a '{' to the end of the string when it occurs.