How to Fix “TypeError: can’t use a string pattern on a bytes-like object in re.findall()” Error

In this article I am going to show you how to fix “TypeError: can’t use a string pattern on a bytes-like object in re.findall()” error.

In my case, this error was caused by the following line of code:

text = text.encode('ascii','ignore')
keywords = re.findall(r'[a-zA-Z]\w+',text)

This code firstly encodes the string into bytes and subsequently tries to apply regular expression to it. The second line is trying to match a string pattern on a byte-like object, which is the text variable. Therefore, it raises a TypeError: can’t use a string pattern on a bytes-like object in re.findall() error.

In order to fix this error, we need to decode what we have encoded. Just change your code like this:

text = text.encode('ascii','ignore')
text=text.decode('utf-8')

keywords = re.findall(r'[a-zA-Z]\w+',text)

Problem solved!