Word count script in Python

Question

Can someone please explain me why there is 'b' in front of each word and how to get read of it? Script returns something like this:

word= b'yesterday,' , count = 3

current_word = {}
current_count = 0
text = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/KseniaGiansar/pythonProject2_text/master/yesterday.txt"
request = urllib.request.urlopen(text)
each_word = []
words = None
count = 1
same_words ={}
word = []

# сollect words into a list
for line in request:
    #print "Line = " , line
    line_words = line.split()
    for word in line_words:  # looping each line and extracting words
        each_word.append(word)
for words in each_word:
    if words.lower() not in same_words.keys() :
        same_words[words.lower()]=1
    else:
        same_words[words.lower()]=same_words[words.lower()]+1
for each in same_words.keys():
    print("word = ", each, ", count = ",same_words[each])

Answer 1

It is indicating that the variable words is a bytes object.

urllib.request.urlopen() returns a bytes object.

To fix this, you can use the .decode() method to convert the bytes object to a string before appending it to the list.

for line in request:
    line_words = line.decode().split() # decode the bytes object to a string
    for word in line_words:
        each_word.append(word)