CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonunicode
tog
tog

Reputation: 103

AttributeError: 'unicode' object has no attribute 'remove'

I'm trying to turn a string into a list of separate words--nothing but letters. However, as far as I can tell, unicode is causing the problems.

essay_text = ['This,', 'this,', 'this', 'and', 'that.']

def create_keywords(self):
    low_text = self.essay_text.lower()
    word_list = low_text.split()
    abcs = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v', 'x', 'y', 'z']
    for n in word_list:
        for m in n:
            for l in abcs:
                if m!=l:
                    n.remove(m)
        self.keywords.setdefault(n, 0)
        self.keywords[n] = word_list.count(n)
        for m in bad_words:
            if n==m:
                del self.keywords[n]
    print self.keywords

I get this error:

AttributeError: 'unicode' object has no attribute 'remove'

How can I solve this?

Update: I don't understand why my strings are in unicode. If it is relevant, here is the class that this model lies under:

class Essay(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    author = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    email = models.EmailField(max_length=100)
    essay_text = models.TextField()
    sources = models.TextField()

    def __unicode__(self):
         return self.title

Why are my strings in in unicode?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 30180

Answers (3)

Mark Tolonen
Mark Tolonen

Reputation: 177901

Do you have a from __future__ import unicode_literals in your code? That would cause Python 2.X to treat 'string' as Unicode.

As others have said, strings aren't mutable and do not have a remove method.

There are a couple of modules that greatly simplify your goal:

import re
from collections import Counter

bad_words = ['and']

def create_keywords():
    essay_text = 'This, this, this and that.'
    # This regular expression finds consecutive strings of lowercase letters.
    # Counter counts each unique string and collects them in a dictionary.
    result = Counter(re.findall(r'[a-z]+',essay_text.lower()))
    for w in bad_words:
        result.pop(w)
    return dict(result) # return a plain dict instead of a Counter object.

Output:

>>> create_keywords()
{'this': 3, 'that': 1}

Upvotes: 1

John Spong
John Spong

Reputation: 1381

Strings are immutable, meaning they cannot be changed. What you'll really need to do is create a new string in its place with just the letters:

def just_letters(s):
    return ''.join(l for l in s if l in string.lowercase)

word_list = [just_letters(word) for word in word_list]

Upvotes: 0

Óscar López
Óscar López

Reputation: 236104

The error is explicit: the n variable, which is a string, doesn't have a remove method - that's because strings are immutable in Python. You'll have to create a new string without the characters you want to remove.

Upvotes: 2

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