Why am I seeing TypeError string indices must be integers

Question

I m playing with both learning python and trying to get github issues into a readable form  Using the advice on How can I convert JSON to CSV  I came up with this   import json import csv  f open  issues json   data   json load f  f close    f open  issues csv   wb    csv file csv writer f   csv file writerow   gravatar id   position   number   votes   created at   comments   body   title   updated at   html url   user   labels   state     for item in data          csv file writerow  item  gravatar id    item  position    item  number    item  votes    item  created at    item  comments    item  body    item  title    item  updated at    item  html url    item  user    item  labels    item  state       Where  issues json  is the json file containing my github issues  When I try to run that  I get   File  foo py   line 14  in  lt module gt  csv file writerow  item  gravatar id    item  position    item  number    item  votes    item  created at    item  comments    item  body    item  title    item  updated at    item  html url    item  user    item  labels    item  state      TypeError  string indices must be integers   What am I missing here  Which are the  string indices   I m sure that once I get this working I ll have more issues  but for now   I d just love for this to work   When I tweak the for statement to simply   for item in data      print item   what I get is      issues  -- so I m doing something more basic wrong  Here s a bit of my json     issues     gravatar id   44230311a3dcd684b6c5f81bf2ec9f60   position  2 0  number  263  votes  0  created at   2010 09 17 16 06 50 -0700   comments  11  body   Add missing paging  Older gt  gt   links      when I print data it looks like it is getting munged really oddly    u issues     u body   u Add missing paging  Older gt  gt   lin

User · Answer

I had a similar issue with Pandas  you need to use the iterrows   function to iterate through a Pandas dataset Pandas documentation for iterrows  data   pd read csv  foo csv   for index item in data iterrows        print         format item  gravatar id    item  position       note that you need to handle the index in the dataset that is also returned by the function

User · Answer

This can happen if a comma is missing  I ran into it when I had a list of two-tuples  each of which consisted of a string in the first position  and a list in the second  I erroneously omitted the comma after the first component of a tuple in one case  and the interpreter thought I was trying to index the first component

User · Answer

data is a dict object  So  iterate over it like this   Python 2  for key  value in data iteritems        print key  value   Python 3  for key  value in data items        print key  value

User · Answer

As a rule of thumb  when I receive this error in Python I compare the function signature with the function execution  For example  def print files file list  parent id       for file in file list          print title   s  id   s     file  title    file  id    So if I ll call this function with parameters placed in the wrong order and pass the list as the 2nd argument and a string as the 1st argument  print files parent id  list of files     lt ----- Accidentally switching arguments location  The function will try to iterate over the parent id string instead of file list and it will expect to see the index as an integer pointing to the specific character in string and not an index which is a string  title or id   This will lead to the TypeError  string indices must be integers error  Due to its dynamic nature  as opposed to languages like Java  C  or Typescript   Python will not inform you about this syntax error

User · Answer

The variable item is a string  An index looks like this    gt  gt  gt  mystring    helloworld   gt  gt  gt  print mystring 0   h    The above example uses the 0 index of the string to refer to the first character   Strings can t have string indices  like dictionaries can   So this won t work    gt  gt  gt  mystring    helloworld   gt  gt  gt  print mystring  stringindex   TypeError  string indices must be integers

User · Answer

item is most likely a string in your code  the string indices are the ones in the square brackets  e g   gravatar id  So I d first check your data variable to see what you received there  I guess that data is a list of strings  or at least a list containing at least one string  while it should be a list of dictionaries

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TypeError for Slice Notation str a b   tl dr  use a colon   instead of a comma in between the two indices a and b in str a b     When working with strings and slice notation  a common sequence operation   it can happen that a TypeError is raised  pointing out that the indices must be integers  even if they obviously are   Example   gt  gt  gt  my string    hello world   gt  gt  gt  my string 0 5  TypeError  string indices must be integers   We obviously passed two integers for the indices to the slice notation  right  So what is the problem here   This error can be very frustrating - especially at the beginning of learning Python - because the error message is a little bit misleading   Explanation  We implicitly passed a tuple of two integers  0 and 5  to the slice notation when we called my string 0 5  because 0 5  even without the parentheses  evaluates to the same tuple as  0 5  would do   A comma   is actually enough for Python to evaluate something as a tuple    gt  gt  gt  my variable   0   gt  gt  gt  type my variable   lt class  tuple  gt    So what we did there  this time explicitly    gt  gt  gt  my string    hello world   gt  gt  gt  my tuple   0  5  gt  gt  gt  my string my tuple  TypeError  string indices must be integers   Now  at least  the error message makes sense   Solution  We need to replace the comma   with a colon   to separate the two integers correctly    gt  gt  gt  my string    hello world   gt  gt  gt  my string 0 5   hello    A clearer and more helpful error message could have been something like   TypeError  string indices must be integers  not tuple    A good error message shows the user directly what they did wrong and it would have been more obvious how to solve the problem     So the next time when you find yourself responsible for writing an error description message  think of this example and add the reason or other useful information to error message to let you and maybe other people understand what went wrong    Lessons learned   slice notation uses colons   to separate its indices  and step range  e g  str from to step   tuples are defined by commas    e g  t   1   add some information to error messages for users to understand what went wrong   Cheers and happy programming winklerrr     I know this question was already answered and this wasn t exactly the question the thread starter asked  but I came here because of the above problem which leads to the same error message  At least it took me quite some time to find that little typo    So I hope that this will help someone else who stumbled upon the same error and saves them some time finding that tiny mistake

[python] Why am I seeing "TypeError: string indices must be integers"?

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