Error parsing of tesseract output is brittle: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str'

When using python 3.5 and pillow (the original PIL library is quite old now), I receive an error on this very simple example:

import pytesseract

try:
    import Image
except ImportError:
    from PIL import Image

pytesseract.image_to_string(Image.open('test_image.png'))

The error is:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "tesseract_test.py", line 8, in <module>
    pytesseract.image_to_string(Image.open('test_image.png'))
  File "C:\Users\tbarik\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python35\lib\site-packages\pytesseract\pytesseract.py", line 163, in image_to_string
    errors = get_errors(error_string)
  File "C:\Users\tbarik\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python35\lib\site-packages\pytesseract\pytesseract.py", line 111, in get_errors
    error_lines = tuple(line for line in lines if line.find('Error') >= 0)
  File "C:\Users\tbarik\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python35\lib\site-packages\pytesseract\pytesseract.py", line 111, in <genexpr>
    error_lines = tuple(line for line in lines if line.find('Error') >= 0)
TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str'

I’m using Windows 10, 64-bit, with python x64.

[400yk]

My system is OSX El Captan and I’m running Python 3.6. I had the same problem but now with a little fix of the pytesseract.py, the problem is resolved. The error occurs because we didn’t set the environment variable TESSDATA_PREFIX in the subprocess. Therefore, in the pytesseract.py file, under the function “run_tesseract”, add

my_env = {“TESSDATA_PREFIX”:“/opt/local/share”}

(for me the /opt/local/share is the parent folder that contains tessdata, plz change accordingly)

Then in the same function change the “proc=…” to

proc = subprocess.Popen(command, env=my_env,
        stderr=subprocess.PIPE)

Lastly, at the beginning of the file, change the definition of tesseract_cmd to:

tesseract_cmd = ‘/opt/local/bin/tesseract’

(namely to specify the absolute path, if you aren’t sure, can go to shell and enter “which tesseract” to find out).

After making the above changes, you can run “python3 setup.py install” to install the pytesseract package.

Good luck!

[z3ntu]

In Arch Linux you have to install the package tesseract-data-<lang> eg tesseract-data-eng for english.