GCS - Read a text file from Google Cloud Storage directly into python

The method 'download_as_string()' will read in the content as byte.

Find below an example to process a .csv file.

import csv
from io import StringIO

from google.cloud import storage

storage_client = storage.Client()
bucket = storage_client.get_bucket(YOUR_BUCKET_NAME)

blob = bucket.blob(YOUR_FILE_NAME)
blob = blob.download_as_string()
blob = blob.decode('utf-8')

blob = StringIO(blob)  #tranform bytes to string here

names = csv.reader(blob)  #then use csv library to read the content
for name in names:
    print(f"First Name: {name[0]}")

download_as_string is a method, you need to call it.

print(blob.download_as_string())

More likely, you want to assign it to a variable so that you download it once and can then print it and do whatever else you want with it:

downloaded_blob = blob.download_as_string()
print(downloaded_blob)
do_something_else(downloaded_blob)