Getting Type Error Expected Strings or Bytes Like Object

Question

I am working on a dataset with tweets and I am trying to find the mentions to other users in a tweet, these tweets can have none, single or multiple users mentioned.

Here is the head of the DataFrame:

The following is the function that I created to extract the list of mentions in a tweet:

def getMention(text):
    mention = re.findall('(^|[^@\w])@(\w{1,15})', text)
    if len(mention) > 0:
        return [x[1] for x in mention]
    else:
        return None

I'm trying to create a new column in the DataFrame and apply the function with the following code:

 df['mention'] = df['text'].apply(getMention)

On running this code I get the following error:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
TypeError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-43-426da09a8770> in <module>
----> 1 df['mention'] = df['text'].apply(getMention)

~/anaconda3_501/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pandas/core/series.py in apply(self, func, convert_dtype, args, **kwds)
   3192             else:
   3193                 values = self.astype(object).values
-> 3194                 mapped = lib.map_infer(values, f, convert=convert_dtype)
   3195 
   3196         if len(mapped) and isinstance(mapped[0], Series):

pandas/_libs/src/inference.pyx in pandas._libs.lib.map_infer()

<ipython-input-42-d27373022afd> in getMention(text)
      1 def getMention(text):
      2 
----> 3     mention = re.findall('(^|[^@\w])@(\w{1,15})', text)
      4     if len(mention) > 0:
      5         return [x[1] for x in mention]

~/anaconda3_501/lib/python3.6/re.py in findall(pattern, string, flags)
    220 
    221     Empty matches are included in the result."""
--> 222     return _compile(pattern, flags).findall(string)
    223 
    224 def finditer(pattern, string, flags=0):

TypeError: expected string or bytes-like object

Inspi · Accepted Answer · 2019-06-07 21:05:43Z

1

I can't comment (not enough rep) so here's what I suggest to troubleshoot the error. It seems findall raises an exception because text is not a string so you might want to check which type text actually is, using this:

def getMention(text):
    print(type(text))
    mention = re.findall(r'(^|[^@\w])@(\w{1,15})', text)
    if len(mention) > 0:
        return [x[1] for x in mention]
    else:
        return None

(or the debugger if you know how to)

And if text can be converted to a string maybe try this ?

def getMention(text):
    mention = re.findall(r'(^|[^@\w])@(\w{1,15})', str(text))
    if len(mention) > 0:
        return [x[1] for x in mention]
    else:
        return None

P.S.: don't forget the r'...' in front of your regexp, to avoid special chars to be interpreted

edited Jun 7, 2019 at 21:05

answered Jun 7, 2019 at 20:58

Inspi

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1 Comment

Adarsh Ravi Over a year ago

Thanks! There was blank string in one of the rows which was being treated as float type, I had tried printing the column values but I did notice a blank row but I assumed it will be still treated as a blank string and not NaN value. Just made a slight change to the code to just print the types of the values which are not str this way it's easier to find the type error.

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