带有re和csv的Python“ TypeError：预期的字符串或缓冲区”

Question

So I am working on a program that grabs a Twitter username from a csv file and plugs it into a function that downloads all the tweets. I pretty much have gotten it to work except I think the output of the row from the csv has brackets and apostrophes, ['POTUS'] instead of POTUS , which Twitter won't accept.

Here is the code I am using:

with open('names.csv') as namescsv:
    namereader = csv.reader(namescsv)
    for row in namereader:
        row = re.sub(r'[^\w=]', '',row)
        print row

I used re to try to remove the odd characters, but when I execute the code I get this error:

File "/home/ian/Desktop/tweepy_scripts/tweetdownloader_allcsv_v2.py", line 66, in <module>
    row = re.sub(r'[^\w=]', '',row)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/re.py", line 151, in sub
    return _compile(pattern, flags).sub(repl, string, count)
TypeError: expected string or buffer

Some help would be awesome! I'm a beginner and my attempts to solve the problem using previous articles hasn't yielded much.

Answer 1

I think the output of the row from the csv has brackets and apostrophes, ['POTUS'] instead of POTUS

No, it doesn't. The output of the row from the csv module is a list of str s. When you display the list (using, for example, print ), it is displayed with the punctuation you describe.

Instead of passing row off to the Twitter API, you might need to pass a single cell of the row. The first cell is called row[0] , so you might need:

result = whatever.the.twitter.api.is.called(row[0]) 

Answer 2

It's because your row variable is a list, not a string - and Python is warning you that it expects a string. try something like this:

import csv
import re

with open('names.csv') as namescsv:
    namereader = csv.reader(namescsv)
    for row in namereader:
        for cell in row:
            cell = re.sub(r'[^\w=]', '',cell)
            print cell