py3: a second argument to open can't be bytes This fixes open(filename, 'r'), open(filename, 'w'), etc. calls. In Python 3, that second argument *must* be a string, you can't use bytes. The fix is the same as used with getattr() (where the second argument must also always be a string); in the tokenizer, where we detect calls, if there is something that looks like a call to open (and is not an attribute, so the previous token is not a "." dot) then make sure that that second argument is not converted to a `bytes` object instead. There is some remaining issue where the current transformer will also rewrite open(f('foo')). However this also affect function for which we perform similar rewrite ('getattr', 'setattr', 'hasattr', 'safehasattr') and will be dealt with in a follow up.