PatternFill issue using Openpyxl on Python. Can anyone help me?

Question

I'm trying to change the background color of a cell according to its text using IF and Patternfill from Openpyxl but I'm receiving a type error. See bellow the code:

#Level - Replied Travel Alerts(RTA)
        incident_index = item.body.index("incident") + 12
        category_indexpos = item.body[incident_index:].index("Category") + incident_index
        level = item.body[incident_index:category_indexpos]
        ws.cell(row=index+2, column = 2).value = level
        
        if "Advisory" in level:
            advisory_pattern = Pattern(patternType = "solid", fgColor="FFFF00")
            ws.cell(row=index+2, column = 2).fill = advisory_pattern
        
        elif "Notice" in level:
            notice_pattern = Pattern(patternType = "solid", fgColor = "00B050")
            ws.cell(row=index+2, column = 2).fill = notice_pattern
        elif "Special" in level:
            special_pattern = Pattern(patternType = "solid", fgColor= "FF0000")
            ws.cell(row=index+2, column = 2).fill = special_pattern

but I'm getting an error on the "advisory_pattern = Pattern(patternType = "solid", fgColor="FFFF00")" line. See the message:

Exception has occurred: TypeError cannot create 're.Pattern' instances

Can anyone help me?

Thanks

Answer 1

Well, re.Pattern is from the python re library, which has nothing to do with creating background fills in Openpyxl

First, I would use this import at the top of your code:

from openpyxl.styles import fills

Then you can modify your lines to fit this format (I used your first fill as my example):

ws.cell(row=index+2, column = 2).fill = fills.PatternFill("solid", fgColor="FFFF00")

If you want to store your fills in variables still, just make sure you are using fill objects from the openpyxl fills library and not Pattern objects from the python re library.