AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'write'

I'm working on Python and have defined a variable called "_headers" as shown below

_headers = ('id', 'recipient_address_1', 'recipient_address_2', 'recipient_address_3', 'recipient_address_4', 'recipient_address_5', 'recipient_address_6', 'recipient_postcode', )

and in order to write this into an output file, I've written the following statement but it throws me the error "AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'write'"

with open(outfile, 'w') as f: outfile.write(self._headers) print done

Please help

3 Answers

You want f.write, not outfile.write...

outfile is the name of the file as a string. f is the file object.

As noted in the comments, file.write expects a string, not a sequence. If you wanted to write data from a sequence, you could use file.writelines. e.g. f.writelines(self._headers). But beware, this doesn't append a newline to each line. You need to do that yourself. :)

Assuming that you want 1 header per line, try this:

with open(outfile, 'w') as f: f.write('\n'.join(self._headers)) print done

To stay as close to your script as possible:

>>> _headers = ('id',
... 'recipient_address_1',
... 'recipient_address_2',
... 'recipient_address_3',
... 'recipient_address_4',
... 'recipient_address_5',
... 'recipient_address_6',
... 'recipient_postcode',
... )
>>> done = "Operation successfully completed"
>>> with open('outfile', 'w') as f:
... for line in _headers:
... f.write(line + "\n")
... print done
Operation successfully completed