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TypeError expected string or bytes-like object - Pycharm

I can't find why is this error is happening.

TypeError: expected string or bytes-like object

I am trying to get the time that 'Huffington Post' appears as sponsor, using the code:

polls = list(set(covid_approval_polls["sponsor"]))

Huff_Post_regexp = r"\bHuffington Post\b"

Huff_Post = [
   approval 
   for approval in polls 
   if re.search(Huff_Post_regexp, approval) is not None
]

The dataframe looks like:

 start_date    end_date         pollster    sponsor  sample_size population  \
0  2020-02-02  2020-02-04           YouGov  Economist       1500.0          a   
1  2020-02-02  2020-02-04           YouGov  Economist        376.0          a   
2  2020-02-02  2020-02-04           YouGov  Economist        523.0          a   
3  2020-02-02  2020-02-04           YouGov  Economist        599.0          a   
4  2020-02-07  2020-02-09  Morning Consult        NaN       2200.0          a
Solution

  • The arguments of the re.search must be "string" or "byte". As I see in your "sponser" column, there is a NaN which interpreted as float so in that iteration approval is neither string nor byte. This is why you get that TypeError.

    Write this code to see that in action:

    for item in list(set(covid_approval_polls["sponsor"])):
    print(item, type(item))

    To solve this, you can either ignore the re.search with single condition pd.isna() or maybe replace the NaNs in DataFrame with empty string "".