How to Solve Python AttributeError: ‘int’ object has no attribute ‘sort’

This error occurs if you try to call the sort() method on an integer as if it were a list. You can solve this error by ensuring you do not assign an integer to a variable name for an existing list that you want to sort.

For example,

my_int = 14

my_list = [17, 222, 23, 14, 1, 45, 120]

print(my_list.sort())

This tutorial will go through the error in detail and how to solve it with code examples.

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AttributeError: ‘int’ object has no attribute ‘sort’

AttributeError occurs in a Python program when we try to access an attribute (method or property) that does not exist for a particular object. sort() is a list method, which sorts the specified list in ascending order by default.

Example

Let’s look at an example of trying to sort an integer. First, we will define a list of integers.

num = [2, 3, 12, 4, 10, 4, 27]

Next, we will use the max() function to get the largest integer in the list and assign it to the variable name num.

num = max(num)
print(num)

27

Then, we will attempt to sort the list of integers in ascending order and print the result to the console.

num.sort()

print(num)

Let’s run the code code to see what happens:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
AttributeError                            Traceback (most recent call last)
Input In [8], in <cell line: 1>()
----> 1 num.sort()
      2 print(num)

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

The error occurs because we named the integer returned by the max() function num, which overrides the list with the same name. We can check the type of an object using the built-in type() function.

print(type(num))

<class 'int'>

We can see that the num variable stores an int object, not a list object.

Solution

We can solve the error by deleting the int object with the name num using the del keyword and redefining the list with a unique name that we will not override.

del num

num_list = [2, 3, 12, 4, 10, 4, 27]

max_num = max(num_list)

print(max_num)

num_list.sort()

print(num_list)

We also named the integer returned by the max() function max_num, which is different from the name of the list.

We can safely sort the list and print the result to the console.

[2, 3, 4, 4, 10, 12, 27]

Summary

Congratulations on reading to the end of this tutorial!

For further reading on AttributeErrors, go to the article:

• Python AttributeError: ‘list’ object has no attribute ‘split’
• How to Solve Python AttributeError: ‘int’ object has no attribute ‘split’
• How to Solve Python AttributeError: ‘int’ object has no attribute ‘strip’ 

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Have fun and happy researching!