AttributeError: … object has no attribute 'update'

Question

I have the following code to download HTML content from a list of URLs. Whenever I run it I get an error that says "Traceback (most recent call last):

 File "*******", line 16, in <module>
    **hashMessage = computeMD5(url)**

  File "*******", line 13, in computeMD5
    **m.update(message)**

*AttributeError: 'builtin_function_or_method' object has no attribute 'update'*

and here is the code:

    import hashlib
    from hashlib import md5
    import os

    fh = open("****.txt", 'r')

    for line in fh:
         url = line
         url = url.replace('\n', '')

         def computeMD5(message):
            m = hashlib.md5
            m.update(message)
            return m.hexdigest()

        hashMessage = computeMD5(url)
        print hashMessage

        os.system(" wget -O /desktop/Html" + hashMessage + ".txt " + url)

How can I fix this?

Answer 1

You are attempting to call a method on a function and not an object. Instead call:

import hashlib
from hashlib import md5
import os

fh = open("****.txt", 'r')

for line in fh:
     url = line
     url = url.replace('\n', '')

     def computeMD5(message):
        m = hashlib.md5()  # instead of m = hashlib.md5
        m.update(message)
        return m.hexdigest()

    hashMessage = computeMD5(url)
    print hashMessage

    os.system(" wget -O /desktop/Html" + hashMessage + ".txt " + url)