TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not iterable even though it says it's a string, why is that so?

Question

The goal of this function is to check whether an Amazon item is unavailable or not.

def check(url):
    headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.3'}
        page = requests.get(url, headers = headers)

        doc = html.fromstring(page.content)
        XPATH_AVAILABILITY = '//div[@id ="availability"]//text()'
        RAw_AVAILABILITY = doc.xpath(XPATH_AVAILABILITY)
        AVAILABILITY = ''.join(RAw_AVAILABILITY).strip()
        if any(re.match(r'unavailable', str(AVAILABILITY), re.IGNORECASE)):
            return "UNAVAILABLE"
        else:
            return "AVAILABLE"

I checked the type() of the AVAILABILITY variable (it's string) and it looks like this when the item is unavailable:

Currently unavailable.
        
        
    
    
    
    



    
    
         
        
        
            We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock.

and like this (type: string) when it's available:

In Stock. or In stock.

That's why I opted for the regex for detection of "unavailable" in the output. But the error says:

File "scra.py", line 68, in

if any(re.match(r'unavailable', check(i), re.IGNORECASE)):

TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not iterable

It never outputs a "None" ever that's why I'm surprised. Please help me solve this.

Answer 1

any(x) iterates over x and returns True if it finds an element that evaluates true, or False if it gets to the end.

re.match returns either a Match object if a matches is found or None .

Your content must not match the regular expression, re.match returns None and any can't iterate over it.