AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'decode'

[jburos]

Seeing the following error with read_files in python3:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
AttributeError                            Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-3-e7b7aaade4df> in <module>()
----> 1 survivalstan.utils.read_files(path='models')

.../.env/lib/python3.5/site-packages/survivalstan/utils.py in read_files(path, pattern, encoding, resource)
    192         file_data['code'] = _read_file(
    193             file,
--> 194             resource=resource).decode(encoding)
    195         results[file_data['basename']] = file_data['code']
    196     return(results)

AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'decode'

Appears to happen when the file being indexed is empty.