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

AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'sort' #

The Python "AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'sort'" occurs when we try to call the sort() method on a string. To solve the error, use the sorted() function if you need to sort a string alphabetically, or split the words of the string and sort them.

Here is an example of how the error occurs.

Copied!
my_str = 'cba'

# ⛔️ AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'sort'
result = my_str.sort()

Strings don't have a sort() method and are immutable in Python.

If you need to sort a string alphabetically, use the sorted() function.

Copied!
my_str = 'cba'

result = ''.join(sorted(my_str))

print(result)  # 👉️ "abc"

The sorted function returns a new sorted list from the items in the iterable.

Copied!
my_str = 'cba'

print(sorted(my_str))  # 👉️ ['a', 'b', 'c']

The last step is to join the list into a string without any separators.

The str.join method takes an iterable as an argument and returns a string which is the concatenation of the strings in the iterable.

If you need to sort the words in a string, split them into a list and call the sort() method on the list.

Copied!
my_str = 'Carl Ben Alice'

result = my_str.split(' ')
print(result)  # 👉️ ['Carl', 'Ben', 'Alice']

result.sort()

print(result)  # 👉️ ['Alice', 'Ben', 'Carl']

The str.split() method splits the original string into a list of substrings using a delimiter.

The method takes the following 2 parameters:

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

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

Copied!
my_string = 'hello world'

# [ 'capitalize', 'casefold', 'center', 'count', 'encode', 'endswith', 'expandtabs', 'find', 'format',
#  'format_map', 'index', 'isalnum', 'isalpha', 'isascii', 'isdecimal', 'isdigit', 'isidentifier',
#  'islower', 'isnumeric', 'isprintable', 'isspace', 'istitle', 'isupper', 'join', 'ljust', 'lower',
#  'lstrip', 'maketrans', 'partition', 'removeprefix', 'removesuffix', 'replace', 'rfind', 'rindex',
#  'rjust', 'rpartition', 'rsplit', 'rstrip', 'split', 'splitlines', 'startswith', 'strip', 'swapcase',
#  'title', 'translate', 'upper', 'zfill']
print(dir(my_string))

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.

Since sort() is not a method implemented by strings, the error is caused.