TypeError coercing to Unicode need string or buffer

Question

This code returns the following error message    with open  infile  mode  r   buffering -1  as in f  open  outfile  mode  w   buffering -1  as out f  TypeError  coercing to Unicode  need string or buffer  file found      Opens each file to read modify infile open  110331 HS1A 1 rtTA result   r   outfile open  2 txt   w    import re  with open  infile  mode  r   buffering -1  as in f  open  outfile  mode  w   buffering -1  as out f      f    i for i in in f if i rstrip        for line in f             k   line split   t  1          x   re findall r  1  100 t   -  chr  d     d        d       k          if not x              continue         out f write     join x 0       n      Please someone help me

User · Answer

Here is the best way I found for Python 2:

def inplace_change(file,old,new):
        fin = open(file, "rt")
        data = fin.read()
        data = data.replace(old, new)
        fin.close()

        fin = open(file, "wt")
        fin.write(data)
        fin.close()

An example:

inplace_change('/var/www/html/info.txt','youtub','youtube')

User · Answer

You re trying to open each file twice  First you do   infile open  110331 HS1A 1 rtTA result   r     and then you pass infile  which is a file object  to the open function again   with open  infile  mode  r   buffering -1    open is of course expecting its first argument to be a file name  not an opened file   Open the file once only and you should be fine

User · Answer

For the less specific case  not just the code in the question - since this is one of the first results in Google for this generic error message  This error also occurs when running certain os command with None argument   For example     os path exists arg    os stat arg    Will raise this exception when arg is None

User · Answer

You re trying to pass file objects as filenames  Try using  infile    110331 HS1A 1 rtTA result  outfile    2 txt    at the top of your code    Not only does the doubled usage of open   cause that problem with trying to open the file again  it also means that infile and outfile are never closed during the course of execution  though they ll probably get closed once the program ends

[python] TypeError: coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer

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