datasets = tfds.load(name="mnist") comes with error "Expected binary or unicode string, got WindowsGPath......" - tensorflow

Question

I have some difficulty with tensorflow_datasets when I was trying to load mnist.
python:3.7
tensorflow : 2.1.0
tensorflow_datasets has been upgraded to latest version 4.6, because the default version of tensorflow_datasets from tensorflow installation has no attribute 'load'
But now the problem is data can not be downloaded and extracted successfully.
with the following command:
datasets = tfds.load(name="mnist")
the error message is :
Downloading and preparing dataset Unknown size (download: Unknown size, generated: Unknown size, total: Unknown size) to ~\tensorflow_datasets\mnist\3.0.1...
Extraction completed...: 0 file [00:00, ? file/s]██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 4/4 [00:00<00:00, 138.37 url/s]
Dl Size...: 100%|██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 11594722/11594722 [00:00<00:00, 373172106.07 MiB/s]
Dl Completed...: 100%|█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 4/4 [00:00<00:00, 122.03 url/s]
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
File "C:\Users\Wilso\Anaconda3\envs\tfgpu\lib\site-packages\tensorflow_datasets\core\load.py", line 327, in load
dbuilder.download_and_prepare(**download_and_prepare_kwargs)
File "C:\Users\Wilso\Anaconda3\envs\tfgpu\lib\site-packages\tensorflow_datasets\core\dataset_builder.py", line 483, in download_and_prepare
download_config=download_config,
File "C:\Users\Wilso\Anaconda3\envs\tfgpu\lib\site-packages\tensorflow_datasets\core\dataset_builder.py", line 1222, in _download_and_prepare
disable_shuffling=self.info.disable_shuffling,
File "C:\Users\Wilso\Anaconda3\envs\tfgpu\lib\site-packages\tensorflow_datasets\core\split_builder.py", line 310, in submit_split_generation
return self._build_from_generator(**build_kwargs)
File "C:\Users\Wilso\Anaconda3\envs\tfgpu\lib\site-packages\tensorflow_datasets\core\split_builder.py", line 376, in _build_from_generator
leave=False,
File "C:\Users\Wilso\Anaconda3\envs\tfgpu\lib\site-packages\tqdm\std.py", line 1195, in iter
for obj in iterable:
File "C:\Users\Wilso\Anaconda3\envs\tfgpu\lib\site-packages\tensorflow_datasets\image_classification\mnist.py", line 151, in _generate_examples
images = _extract_mnist_images(data_path, num_examples)
File "C:\Users\Wilso\Anaconda3\envs\tfgpu\lib\site-packages\tensorflow_datasets\image_classification\mnist.py", line 350, in _extract_mnist_images
f.read(16) # header
File "C:\Users\Wilso\Anaconda3\envs\tfgpu\lib\site-packages\tensorflow_core\python\lib\io\file_io.py", line 122, in read
self._preread_check()
File "C:\Users\Wilso\Anaconda3\envs\tfgpu\lib\site-packages\tensorflow_core\python\lib\io\file_io.py", line 84, in _preread_check
compat.as_bytes(self.__name), 1024 * 512)
File "C:\Users\Wilso\Anaconda3\envs\tfgpu\lib\site-packages\tensorflow_core\python\util\compat.py", line 87, in as_bytes
(bytes_or_text,))
TypeError: Expected binary or unicode string, got WindowsGPath('C:\Users\Wilso\tensorflow_datasets\downloads\extracted\GZIP.cvdf-datasets_mnist_train-images-idx3-ubyteRA_Kv3PMVG-iFHXoHqNwJlYF9WviEKQCTSyo8gNSNgk.gz')

Answer 1

Try:
(ds_train, ds_test), ds_info = tfds.load(
"mnist",
split=["train", "test"],
shuffle_files=True,
as_supervised=True, # will return tuple (img, label) otherwise dict
with_info=True, # able to get info about dataset
)