Python encode list 'list' object has no attribute 'encode'

Question

trying to remove \u0141 from this list which i am trying to insert into my database

results=[['The Squid Legion', '0', u'Banda \u0141ysego', '1', ["\nRazer's Clash of the Gods EU #12 - \nChallonge\n"]], ['Romanian eSports', '1', 'Love', '0', ["\nRazer's Clash of the Gods EU #12 - \nChallonge\n"]]]

results =[[x.encode('ascii', 'ignore')  for x in l] for l in results]

I am getting this error:

AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'encode'

Your list is at least 3 levels deep but you're only iterating 2 levels. — Mark Ransom, Mar 06 '14 at 17:03
@user3386406: your list structure is `[[smth, smth, [smth]], ...]` but your algorithm expects `[[smth, smth, smth], ...]`; see my answer for a working algorithm. — Erik Kaplun, Mar 06 '14 at 17:16

Erik Kaplun · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-06T17:15:07.707

The first list in your "big list" itself contains a list ["\nRazer's Clash of the Gods EU #12 - \nChallonge\n"], which obviously doesn't have an encode() method on it.

So what happens in your algorithm is this:

[[somestring.encode, somestring.encode, somestring.encode, [somestring].encode, ...]

You could use a simple recursive algorithm though:

def recursive_ascii_encode(lst):
    ret = []
    for x in lst:
        if isinstance(x, basestring):  # covers both str and unicode
            ret.append(x.encode('ascii', 'ignore'))
        else:
            ret.append(recursive_ascii_encode(x))
    return ret

print recursive_ascii_encode(results)

outputs:

[['The Squid Legion', '0', 'Banda ysego', '1', ["\nRazer's Clash of the Gods EU #12 - \nChallonge\n"]], ['Romanian eSports', '1', 'Love', '0', ["\nRazer's Clash of the Gods EU #12 - \nChallonge\n"]]]

Of course that's actually a special case of a more general recursive map, which, refactored, looks like this:

def recursive_map(lst, fn):
    return [recursive_map(x, fn) if isinstance(x, list) else fn(x) for x in lst]

print recursive_map(results, lambda x: x.encode('ascii', 'ignore'))

Python encode list 'list' object has no attribute 'encode'

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