TypeError: coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer, file found (open() function)

Question

I'm new to programing especially Python. I'm trying to learn it with this tutorial . I'm at exercise 19 now and one of the study drills is to create my own function of my own design and run it ten different times. I think I did well so far until the 10th run. It's my first time trying to create and write in a file and then open it again to take the numbers out and put it in the bread_and_butter variable. The error looks like this: ``` Traceback (most recent call last): File "ex19b.py", line 95, in <module> j2 = open(j1) TypeError: coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer, file found ``` ``` from sys import argv def bread_and_butter(bread, butter): print "I have %d bread(s) and %d grams butter
" % (bread, butter) print "1. I can give it the numbers directly:" bread_and_butter(10, 15) print "2. Or I could use variables from my script:" amount_of_bread = 10 amount_of_butter = 15 bread_and_butter(amount_of_bread, amount_of_butter) print "3. We can even do math inside it:" bread_and_but…

Accepted Answer

You are getting this error because `open` is looking for a file name, and you're passing to it the file object itself, `j1`. If you open `j` instead for instance, you will no longer have the error.

EDIT: If you want to open a file and read specific lines, I would use something like this:

```
j1 = open(j, 'w')
for i, line in enumerate(j1):
    if i == 12:
        # this is the 13th line
    elif i == 312:
        # this is the 313th line
    elif i > 1000:
        break
j1.close()
```

TypeError: coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer, file found (open() function)

Solution

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