AttributeError: 'int' object has no attribute 'X' (Python)

AttributeError: 'int' object has no attribute 'X' (Python) #

The Python "AttributeError: 'int' object has no attribute" occurs when we try to access an attribute that doesn't exist on an integer. To solve the error, make sure the value is of the expected type before accessing the attribute.

Here is an example of how the error occurs.

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example = 123

print(type(example))  # 👉️ <class 'int'>

# ⛔️ AttributeError: 'int' object has no attribute 'startswith'
result = example.startswith('12')

We tried to call the startswith() method on an integer and got the error.

If you print() the value you are accessing the attribute on, it will be an integer.

To solve the error in the example, we would have to convert the integer to a string to be able to access the string-specific startswith() method.

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example = 123

result = str(example).startswith('12')

print(result)  # 👉️ True

Most commonly the error is caused by reassigning a variable to an integer somewhere in your code.

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nums = [1, 2, 3]

# 👇️ reassignment of nums to an integer
nums = 1

# ⛔️ AttributeError: 'int' object has no attribute 'append'
nums.append(4)

print(nums)

We set the nums variable to a list initially but later assigned an integer to it.

To solve the error in this scenario, we have to remove the reassignment or correct it.

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nums = [1, 2, 3]

nums.append(4)

print(nums)  # 👉️ [1, 2, 3, 4]

If you need to check whether an object contains an attribute, use the hasattr function.

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example = 5

if hasattr(example, 'lower'):
    print(example.lower())
else:
    print('Attribute is not present on object')  # 👉️ this runs

The hasattr function takes the following 2 parameters:

The hasattr() function returns True if the string is the name of one of the object's attributes, otherwise False is returned.

A good way to start debugging is to print(dir(your_object)) and see what attributes the object has.

Here is an example of what printing the attributes of an integer looks like.

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example = 5

#  [..., 'as_integer_ratio', 'bit_count', 'bit_length', 'conjugate', 'denominator', 'from_bytes', 'imag', 'numerator', 'real', 'to_bytes'...]
print(dir(example))

If you pass a class to the dir() function, it returns a list of names of the classes' attributes, and recursively of the attributes of its bases.

To solve the error, either convert the value to the correct type before accessing the attribute, or correct the type of the value you are assigning to the variable before accessing any attributes.