TypeError Reading a GeoJSON file

Python version: Python 3.6.3 OS: Mac OSX 10.12.6

I’m wondering if anyone could help me with this error? I’m trying to load a Geojson file into a dataframe with OSM2PGSQL data downloaded from https://mapzen.com/data/metro-extracts/metro/birmingham_england/

When calling gpd.read_file with the points datafile I get the below error. I’m on a new Mac for work so perhaps I havn’t got a dependency installed? Any help would be great.

TypeError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-17-e215e87f454f> in <module>()
----> 1 gpd.read_file(points_datafile)

/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/geopandas/io/file.py in read_file(filename, **kwargs)
     24         else:
     25             f_filt = f
---> 26         gdf = GeoDataFrame.from_features(f_filt, crs=crs)
     27 
     28         # re-order with column order from metadata, with geometry last

/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/geopandas/geodataframe.py in from_features(cls, features, crs)
    207 
    208         rows = []
--> 209         for f in features_lst:
    210             if hasattr(f, "__geo_interface__"):
    211                 f = f.__geo_interface__

fiona/ogrext.pyx in fiona.ogrext.Iterator.__next__()

fiona/ogrext.pyx in fiona.ogrext.FeatureBuilder.build()

TypeError: startswith first arg must be bytes or a tuple of bytes, not str```

[koneshgit]

I did the following and it’s working

sFile = open(r"myFile.geojson","rb")
gdf = gpd.read_file(sFile)
data = json.loads(gdf.to_json())

[jschito]

I had the same issue an in my case it was an encoding error while reading the GeoJSON. I expected that the encoding of the input GeoJSON was UTF-8, but instead, it was ANSI. After I encoded the GeoJSON to UTF-8, everything worked properly. I noticed the error on the first occurrence of a special case in the properties (e.g. the German Umlaut ä, Ä, ö, Ö, ü, Ü), thus, I thought it could have something to do with the encoding.