Python. AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'startswith'
attributeerror, lambda, powershell, python-2.7, web-scraping
Solution
In the first line of code, you are getting the attribute error because the code assumes that `job` contains a string, which has the method `startswith()`, but it doesn't contain a string, it contains `None`.
In the second line of code, you are not getting the attribute error because the code is testing to see if `job` contains `None`, before calling `startswith()` on it. Another (not quite equivalent but arguably better) way to express
lambda job: job and job.startswith('Internship')
is
lambda job: job.startswith('Internship') if job else False
Problem
Why is it this code won't work and give AttributeError? ``` internship = parser.find_all('a', attrs = {'title': lambda job: job.startswith('Internship')}) ``` while this one works: ``` internship = parser.find_all('a', attrs = {'title': lambda job: job and job.startswith('Internship')}) ``` This is the error that I got from the first code: ``` Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\bs4\element.py", line 1299, in find_all return self._find_all(name, attrs, text, limit, generator, **kwargs) File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\bs4\element.py", line 549, in _find_all found = strainer.search(i) File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\bs4\element.py", line 1690, in search found = self.search_tag(markup) File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\bs4\element.py", line 1662, in search_tag if not self._matches(attr_value, match_against): File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\bs4\element.py", line 1722, in _matches return match_against(markup) File "<stdin>", line 1, in <lambda> AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'startswith' ```