GTFtools with Homo_sapiens.GRCh38.103.gtf encoding error in python

Question

[Doreen]

I adapted GTF tools to work with python3. The demo.gtf runs fine, but if I try using it with Homo_sapiens.GRCh38.103.gtf from ensembl I get Decoding error:

f = open(gtf)
f.readline()
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x8b in position 1: invalid start byte

I tried playing around with the loading. Specifying utf-8 doesn't help.

f = open(gtf, encoding= 'utf-8' )
f.readline()
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x8b in position 1: invalid start byte

Ascii also fails.

f = open(gtf, encoding="ascii")
f.readline()
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x8b in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)

Encoding = 'latin-1' works but resulting string seems to output gibbrish.

Reading bits works but I need to get the string.

f = open(gtf, 'rb )
f.readline()

python2 also throws an error later on in the script, but looking at printouts it seems it loads gibberish to get that far.

I don't think it was the decompressing - gunzip -d Homo_sapiens.GRCh38.103.abinitio.gtf.gz

Any ideas on how to get this Gnome release to work?

Thanks!

[Doreen]

Homo_sapiens.GRCh38.102.gtf works fine, its just Homo_sapiens.GRCh38.103.gtf thats failing