Why do I get an "AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'write' " in this python code

Question

I am attempting to save the text in a beautiful soup object to a file, that I can later edit and use. I've got all necessary modules imported, but for some reason I get the same error every time at "pagename.write(str(soup))" I've tried rewriting this multiple way and I am just stumped

#Testing implementation of writing to file
#save the HTML to a beautiful soup object
soup = BeautifulSoup(browser.page_source, 'html.parser')

#TODO: use breadcrumb of page name for loop later on
breadcrumb = soup.select('.breadcrumb span')
pagename = breadcrumb[0].get_text()

#open a file then write to it
bookPage = os.path.join('books/cpp/VST', pagename+'.txt')
open(pagename, 'wb')
pagename.write(str(soup))

#close file
#pagename.close()


#TODO: move on to next file

`pagename` is a string, not a file object – Ahsanul Haque Oct 24 '15 at 22:14 — Ahsanul Haque, Oct 24 '15 at 22:14

score 3 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:27

3

pagename is a string - the filename extracted from the HTML.

What you meant is to use the bookPage path and a with context manager. Plus, to avoid TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str' error and to get a bytestring, you need to call encode():

with open(bookPage, 'wb') as f:
    f.write(soup.encode("utf-8"))

edited May 23 '17 at 10:27

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answered Oct 24 '15 at 22:16

alecxe

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Thank you for the answer! However now I am getting a type error: TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str' – Dakota Lorance Oct 24 '15 at 22:27
@DakotaLorance okay, how about you call it `f.write(soup.encode("utf-8"))`? – alecxe Oct 24 '15 at 22:34

Why do I get an "AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'write' " in this python code

1 Answers1