Creating dictionary from xlsx: TypeError: argument of type 'Book' is not iterable

Question

I'm pretty new to Python (and the xlrd module), so my code is probably not nearly as compact as it could be. I'm just using it to analyse some data, so it's more important for me to get what I'm doing rather than for me to make the code as compact as possible (though I do hope to improve, so feel free to give me advice on the coding itself, provided you manage to explain it to a 'newbie' :p )

That being said, here's my issue:

Context

I have an xlsx file with data on errors that people made when translating a text. The first column contains a code for the error relative to the text (conceptual errors), the second column contains a code for the translator that made the error. I want to create a dictionary in which the keys are the conceptual error codes, and the values are lists of the different translators that made that conceptual error.

An short fragment from the xlsx (to give you an idea of the codes in the two columns):

1722_Z1_CF5     1722_HT_EV_Z1_F1

1722_Z1_CF1     1722_PE_AL_Z1_F1

1722_Z1_CF9     1722_PE_EVC_Z1_F1

1722_Z1_CF5     1722_PE_LH_Z1_F1

As you can see, the conceptual error '1722_Z1_CF5' has been made by 2 different people ('1722_HT_EV_Z1_F1' and '1722_PE_LH_Z1_F1). The dictionary for this fragment would look something like:

1722_Z1_CF5: 1722_HT_EV_Z1_F1, 1722_PE_LH_Z1_F1
1722_Z1_CF1: 1722_PE_AL_Z1_F1 
1722_Z1_CF9: 1722_PE_EVC_Z1_F1

Code

The code below is what I tried to do to create the dictionary.

def TranslatorsPerError(sheet):

    TotalConceptualErrors(sheet)

    TranslatorsPerError = {}

    for row_index in range(sheet.nrows):
        if sheet.cell(row_index,0).value in ConceptualErrors and sheet.cell(row_index,0).value not in TranslatorsPerError:
            TranslatorsPerError[str(sheet.cell(row_index,0).value)]=[str(sheet.cell(row_index,1).value),]           

        if sheet.cell(row_index,0).value in ConceptualErrors and sheet.cell(row_index,0).value in TranslatorsPerError:
            TranslatorsPerError[str(sheet.cell(row_index,0).value)].append(str(sheet.cell(row_index,1).value))  

return TranslatorsPerError

'TotalConceptualErrors' is a function I created that returns a list ('ConceptualErrors') of the conceptual error codes from the first column without duplicates (and it filters out some other information that was also present in the first column, that's why I needed to use this one first).

Problem

The problem is that this function keeps giving me an error: TypeError: argument of type 'Book' is not iterable

I know that problems with iterables can sometimes be solved by casting certain things into a different type, but I'm not sure how I should solve this one. I tried to use 'str()' for different elements, but that didn't solve the problem. Maybe it has something to do with my code, maybe with the nature of dictionaries or xlrd... (looking at the type 'book', my guess would be on the latter).

Any help or feedback on how to fix this would be greatly appreciated. If you need extra information to understand what's going on or what I'm looking for, please ask.

Answer 1

where is ConceptualErrors being set?