Chapter 17: python_repos.py cannot handle description of None

[egabe05]

When working in Chapter 17 setting up custom tooltips (pp 388-389) I ran into the issue where the description for the project 'shadowsocks' was None. When the project is run you get a 'AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'decode'' exception when you try to render.

To get around this I had to add a None checker before I populate the plot_dict data, something like this:

for repo_dict in repo_dicts:

    # Cleans any none values and replaces with empty string
    for k, v in repo_dict.items():
        if v is None:
            repo_dict[k] = ''

    names.append(repo_dict['name'])
    plot_dict = {
        'value': repo_dict['stargazers_count'],
        'label': repo_dict['description']
    }

    plot_dicts.append(plot_dict)

Not sure this is the fastest way of doing it but it worked for me.

[egabe05]

Couldn't get the entire block of code to formate correctly(for statement should be in the code block) but I think it still makes sense.

[ehmatthes]

Have you seen the updates section in the online resources? There's an update for this issue here.

You and I came up with similar approaches. Here's what I wrote for the update:

names, plot_dicts = [], []
for repo_dict in repo_dicts:
    names.append(repo_dict['name'])

    # Some projects lack a description, which causes an error when 
    #  labeling bars. Specify a label if there's no description.
    description = repo_dict['description']
    if not description:
        description = "No description provided."

    plot_dict = {
        'value': repo_dict['stargazers_count'],
        'label': description,
        }
    plot_dicts.append(plot_dict)

We pull the description from the repo_dict, and then change the description if none is provided. We don't change the repo_dict itself. Same result though, so nice work troubleshooting!

Couldn't get the entire block of code to formate correctly(for statement should be in the code block) but I think it still makes sense.

You can start a code block with triple backticks followed by python, and close the code block with another set of triple backticks. This formats your code with python syntax highlighting. I edited the formatting of your code block with this style.