TypeError: coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer, list found

Question

I\'m trying to get a data parsing script up and running. It works as far as the data manipulation is concerned. What I\'m trying to do is set this up so I can enter multiple

Answer 1

args.infile is a list of filenames, not one filename. Loop over it:

for filename in args.infile:
    base, ext = os.path.splitext(filename)
    with open("{}1{}".format(base, ext), "wb") as outf, open(filename, 'rb') as inf:
        output = csv.writer(outf) 
        for line in csv.reader(inf): 

Here I used os.path.splitext() to split extension and base filename so you can generate a new output filename adding 1 to the base.

Answer 2

If you specify an nargs argument to .add_argument, the argument will always be returned as a list.

Assuming you want to deal with all of the files specified, loop through that list:

for filename in args.infile:
    for line in csv.reader(open(filename)): 
        for item in line[2:]:

            #to skip empty cells
[...]

Or if you really just want to be able to specify a single file; just get rid of nargs="+".