undefined symbol: PyUnicodeUCS2_Decode

Question

I'm trying to connect to my google sheets with gspread. Here is the code:

#IMPORT STANDARD LIBRARIES
import json
import os

#IMPORT THIRD PARTY LIBRARIES
import gspread
from oauth2client.client import SignedJwtAssertionCredentials

key_location = '/home/selecaotwo/Dropbox/Public/my.ENV/' + os.sep + 'sys.CREDENTIALS'
key_file_h = 'test-project-auth-a4f3c4bd20c4.json'
print key_location + os.sep + key_file_h

json_key = json.load(open(key_location + os.sep + key_file_h))
scope = ['https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds']

credentials = SignedJwtAssertionCredentials(json_key['client_email'], json_key['private_key'], scope)
gc = gspread.authorize(credentials)

Running this code gives me the following error:

/home/selecaotwo/Dropbox/Public/my.ENV//sys.CREDENTIALS/test-project-auth-a4f3c4bd20c4.json
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/selecaotwo/Desktop/gspread-test/gspread-test-001-codeRegist-0001.py", line 17, in <module>
    gc = gspread.authorize(credentials)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gspread/client.py", line 335, in authorize
    client.login()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gspread/client.py", line 98, in login
    self.auth.refresh(http)
  File "build/bdist.linux-x86_64/egg/oauth2client/client.py", line 598, in refresh
  File "build/bdist.linux-x86_64/egg/oauth2client/client.py", line 769, in _refresh
  File "build/bdist.linux-x86_64/egg/oauth2client/client.py", line 795, in _do_refresh_request
  File "build/bdist.linux-x86_64/egg/oauth2client/client.py", line 1425, in _generate_refresh_request_body
  File "build/bdist.linux-x86_64/egg/oauth2client/client.py", line 1554, in _generate_assertion
  File "build/bdist.linux-x86_64/egg/oauth2client/crypt.py", line 162, in from_string
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/OpenSSL/__init__.py", line 36, in <module>
    from OpenSSL import crypto
ImportError: /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/OpenSSL/crypto.so: undefined symbol: PyUnicodeUCS2_Decode
[Finished in 0.1s with exit code 1]
[shell_cmd: python -u "/home/selecaotwo/Desktop/gspread-test/gspread-test-001-codeRegist-0001.py"]
[dir: /home/selecaotwo/Desktop/gspread-test]
[path: /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin]

I read on the forums that this is likely an issue between my Ubuntu system (14.04 LTS) and Python (2.7.9) but the weird thing was when I recompiled python with --enable-encoding=usc2, I got the same error on the same line but instead of saying "undefined symbol: PyUnicodeUCS2_Decode" it simply said "undefined symbol: PyUnicodeUCS4_Decode". This leads me to believe the problem may be something else and I'm not sure how to proceed.

Answer 1

I'm not sure if this will solve the problem. Instead of putting in the json file itself, can you try entering the client_email and private key like this. The client_email can be copied as such. For the private key, do this instead:

key = u"-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----\nBLABLA_\n-----END PRIVATE KEY-----\n".encode("utf-8")


credentials = SignedJwtAssertionCredentials(client_email,key,scope)