奇怪的“AttributeError：‘NoneType’对象没有属性‘组’”错误

Question

This might be a pretty obvious error since I'm pretty new to coding, but I'm trying to read a file for a certain value which I'll gather by using re.search and splice since I only know the text before and after it.

I'm running into a bit of an annoying bug. When I use re.search(r"firstPart(.*?)secondPart", data).group(1) it returns

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 10, in <module>
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'group'

Which is a problem with this line:

englishWord = re.search(r"<i>(.*?)</i>", str(englishWord)).group(1)

If you read the code, you can see that I've made some unnecessary lines where instead of writing the entire string in the re.search function I'll use only a little bit then add or remove text in another function. This is because if I do it all in the re.search function normally it doesn't work.

Possibly the most annoying part and confusing about this is that if I run everything before "englishWord = re.search(r" (.*?) ", str(englishWord)).group(1)" then I run it, it works, but if I run all of the code at once I get that error. Any idea why? How can I fix this? Thanks! (I am using python 3.6)

My Code vvv

#!/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.6/bin/python3

import re
import itertools

with open('Desktop/data.txt', 'r') as myfile:
    data=myfile.read().replace('\n', '')

num = 0

for x in itertools.repeat(None, 8):
    num = int(num) + 1
    if int(num) < 10:
        num = '0' + str(num)
    firstString = re.search(r"id=\"question_" + num + "_whole_question\" data-sidebar-reference=\"\">    (.*?) <input", data).group(1)
    secondString = re.search(r"id=\"question_" + num + "_wol_1\"(.*?)  </div>", data).group(1)
    secondString = secondString.replace(" name=\"question_" + num + "_wol_1\" onchange=\"has_unsaved_work();\" size=\"10\" type=\"text\" />", "")
    finalString = firstString + " _" + secondString
    englishWord = re.search(r"(<i><span lang=\"en-US\">(.*?)</span></i>)", finalString)
    englishWord = re.search(r"<i>(.*?)</i>", str(englishWord)).group(1)
    englishWord = "<i>" + englishWord + "</i>"
    finalString = finalString.replace(englishWord, "")
    finalString = finalString.replace("()", "")
    print (finalString)

Answer 1

call group only if there is a match.

res = re.search(r"<i>(.*?)</i>", str(englishWord))
# if there is a match
if res:
   englishWord = res.group(1)

As pointed out in the comments, re.search returns None when no match is found. Link : https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html#re.search