re.sub erroring with “Expected string or bytes-like object”

Question

I have read multiple posts regarding this error, but I still can\'t figure it out. When I try to loop through my function:

def fix_Plan(location):
    letter         


        

Answer 1

I suppose better would be to use re.match() function. here is an example which may help you.

import re
import nltk
from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize
nltk.download('punkt')
sentences = word_tokenize("I love to learn NLP \n 'a :(")
#for i in range(len(sentences)):
sentences = [word.lower() for word in sentences if re.match('^[a-zA-Z]+', word)]  
sentences

Answer 2

As you stated in the comments, some of the values appeared to be floats, not strings. You will need to change it to strings before passing it to re.sub. The simplest way is to change location to str(location) when using re.sub. It wouldn't hurt to do it anyways even if it's already a str.

letters_only = re.sub("[^a-zA-Z]",  # Search for all non-letters
                          " ",          # Replace all non-letters with spaces
                          str(location))

Answer 3

The simplest solution is to apply Python str function to the column you are trying to loop through.

If you are using pandas, this can be implemented as:

dataframe['column_name']=dataframe['column_name'].apply(str)