The error "TypeError: write() argument must be str, not dict" occurs when you pass a dictionary to the write() method in Python. The error might occur when you accidentally passed the whole dictionary instead of a specific key in the dictionary to the write() method. Or if you intended to pass the dictionary itself, you need to convert the dictionary to a string.

Problem

Here is an example of the code in which the error occurs:

with open('sample.txt', 'w', encoding='utf-8') as file:
    dict = {'site': 'Sharooq', 'language': "python"}

    file.write(dict)

Here we passed the "dict" object directly to the write() method. This will result in the error mentioned above.

Solutions

1, Convert the dictionary to a string

You can use the str() method to convert the dictionary object into a string and pass it to the write() method as shown in the following code.

with open('sample.txt', 'w', encoding='utf-8') as file:
    dict = {'site': 'Sharooq', 'language': "python"}

    file.write(str(dict))

The output file is as follows:

{'site': 'Sharooq', 'language': 'python'}

2, Convert the dictionary to a JSON string using json.dumps()

You can convert the dictionary to a JSON string using json.dumps() method. The following code demonstrates the same:

import json
with open('sample.txt', 'w', encoding='utf-8') as file:
    dict = {'site': 'Sharooq', 'language': "python"}

    file.write(json.dumps(dict))

The output file will be in a JSON formatted string as follows:

{"site": "Sharooq", "language": "python"}

3, Accessing a specific key in the dictionary

If you meant to output a specific value to a key in the dictionary, you can follow the following code:

with open('sample.txt', 'w', encoding='utf-8') as file:
    dict = {'site': 'Sharooq', 'language': "python"}

    file.write(str(dict["site"]))

The output will be as following:

Sharooq

The value of the key we are accessing in the dictionary needs to be a string. The write() method only accepts a string as its argument.

How to check the type of a value in the dictionary?

You can use the built-in type() or isinstace() method to check the type of a value.

dict = {'site': 'Sharooq', 'language': "python"}
print(type(dict["site"])) 
print(isinstance(dict["site"], str)) 

The type() method returns the type of a given object.

The isinstance() method takes two arguments. First, the actual value and the second, a type. If the value matches the type, it will return "True".

I hope this was helpful to you. You can visit the feature articles section to find interesting topics. See you in the next one.