What does “TypeError 'xxx' object is not callable” means?

Question

As a starting developer in Python I\'ve seen this error message many times appearing in my console but I don\'t fully understand what does it means.

Could anyone tel

Answer 1

The action occurs when you attempt to call an object which is not a function, as with (). For instance, this will produce the error:

>>> a = 5
>>> a()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
TypeError: 'int' object is not callable

Class instances can also be called if they define a method __call__

One common mistake that causes this error is trying to look up a list or dictionary element, but using parentheses instead of square brackets, i.e. (0) instead of [0]