re.sub erroring with "Expected string or bytes-like object"

Question

I have read multiple posts regarding this error, but I still can't figure it out. When I try to loop through my function:

def fix_Plan(location):     letters_only = re.sub("[^a-zA-Z]",  # Search for all non-letters                           " ",          # Replace all non-letters with spaces                           location)     # Column and row to search          words = letters_only.lower().split()          stops = set(stopwords.words("english"))           meaningful_words = [w for w in words if not w in stops]           return (" ".join(meaningful_words))      col_Plan = fix_Plan(train["Plan"][0])     num_responses = train["Plan"].size     clean_Plan_responses = []  for i in range(0,num_responses):     clean_Plan_responses.append(fix_Plan(train["Plan"][i])) 

Here is the error:

Traceback (most recent call last):   File "C:/Users/xxxxx/PycharmProjects/tronc/tronc2.py", line 48, in <module>     clean_Plan_responses.append(fix_Plan(train["Plan"][i]))   File "C:/Users/xxxxx/PycharmProjects/tronc/tronc2.py", line 22, in fix_Plan     location)  # Column and row to search   File "C:\Users\xxxxx\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\re.py", line 191, in sub     return _compile(pattern, flags).sub(repl, string, count) TypeError: expected string or bytes-like object 

Answer 1

As you stated in the comments, some of the values appeared to be floats, not strings. You will need to change it to strings before passing it to re.sub. The simplest way is to change location to str(location) when using re.sub. It wouldn't hurt to do it anyways even if it's already a str.

letters_only = re.sub("[^a-zA-Z]",  # Search for all non-letters                           " ",          # Replace all non-letters with spaces                           str(location))