list to csv file - AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'writer'

Question

I would like to convert the following list

csv_list[:5]
[['s01_l01/1_1.png', '1', '7C2 4698', '7C24698'],
 ['s01_l01/2_1.png', '1', '7C2 4698', '7C24698'],
 ['s01_l01/2_2.png', '1', '7C2 4698', '7C24698'],
 ['s01_l01/2_3.png', '1', '7C2 4698', '7C24698'],
 ['s01_l01/2_4.png', '1', '7C2 4698', '7C24698']]

to a csv file.

I used this code:

with open('/content/gdrive/My Drive/data/2017-IWT4S-CarsReId_LP-dataset/TrainValV1.csv', 'w', newline='') as file:
    writer = csv.writer(file)
    writer.writerows(csv_list)

And got this error:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
AttributeError                            Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-65-30765791e5c8> in <module>()
      1 with open('/content/gdrive/My Drive/data/2017-IWT4S-CarsReId_LP-dataset/TrainValV1.csv', 'w', newline='') as file:
----> 2     writer = csv.writer(file)
      3     writer.writerows(csv_list)

AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'writer'

What do I have to change?

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

This must mean that csv in line two in that error output is an object of type str , as the error message says. If you post the full code, which shows how you define csv , we could narrow down why that is. Likely you define something else, like csv = '<some string>' sometime after you import csv .

I'll expand a bit about when you usually see AttributeError s in Python, so that you might be able to spot this type of thing quicker in the future. You see that error when you have a line like:

# will error if x does not actually have this attribute
x.some_attribute_y
# This line is basically equivalent to the above line:
getattr(x, 'some_attribute_y')

The error message will say:

AttributeError: '<type of object x>' object has no attribute 'some_attribute_y'