work around for former CStringIO and String IO function in Python 3 Pdfinterp (Pdfminer)

Question

I am using the pdfminer tool to convert pdf to .csv (text) and one of the subcommands in the tool pdfinterp.py still uses the CStringIO and StringIO for string to string translation -

import re
try:
    from CStringIO import StringIO 
except ImportError:
    from StringIO import StringIO

I am using Python 3 so I am aware of the need to change to io and io.StringIO.

How exactly should the above command be re-worded in pdfinterp to make it functional in Python 3.

Answer 1

you could extend your import block to make it compatible with all versions (Python 2.x or 3.x). Ugly because of all try/except blocks but would work

try:
    from CStringIO import StringIO 
except ImportError:
    try:
        from StringIO import StringIO
    except ImportError:
        from io import StringIO

or (slightly better)

import sys
if sys.version_info < (3,)
   try:
       from CStringIO import StringIO 
   except ImportError:        
        from StringIO import StringIO
else:
     from io import StringIO

Be aware that python 3 has BytesIO too because binary data and text data is different now. So if StringIO is used to pass binary data it will fail.