re sub erroring with Expected string or bytes-like object

Question

I have read multiple posts regarding this error  but I still can t figure it out  When I try to loop through my function   def fix Plan location       letters only   re sub    a-zA-Z       Search for all non-letters                                           Replace all non-letters with spaces                           location        Column and row to search          words   letters only lower   split            stops   set stopwords words  english              meaningful words    w for w in words if not w in stops            return      join meaningful words        col Plan   fix Plan train  Plan   0       num responses   train  Plan   size     clean Plan responses       for i in range 0 num responses       clean Plan responses append fix Plan train  Plan   i      Here is the error   Traceback  most recent call last     File  C  Users xxxxx PycharmProjects tronc tronc2 py   line 48  in  lt module gt      clean Plan responses append fix Plan train  Plan   i      File  C  Users xxxxx PycharmProjects tronc tronc2 py   line 22  in fix Plan     location     Column and row to search   File  C  Users xxxxx AppData Local Programs Python Python36 lib re py   line 191  in sub     return  compile pattern  flags  sub repl  string  count  TypeError  expected string or bytes-like object

User · Accepted Answer

As you stated in the comments  some of the values appeared to be floats  not strings  You will need to change it to strings before passing it to re sub  The simplest way is to change location to str location  when using re sub  It wouldn t hurt to do it anyways even if it s already a str   letters only   re sub    a-zA-Z       Search for all non-letters                                           Replace all non-letters with spaces                           str location

User · Answer

I suppose better would be to use re match   function  here is an example which may help you   import re import nltk from nltk tokenize import word tokenize nltk download  punkt   sentences   word tokenize  I love to learn NLP  n  a       for i in range len sentences    sentences    word lower   for word in sentences if re match    a-zA-Z     word     sentences

User · Answer

The simplest solution is to apply Python str function to the column you are trying to loop through  If you are using pandas  this can be implemented as  dataframe  column name   dataframe  column name   apply str

[python] re.sub erroring with "Expected string or bytes-like object"

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