Maximum Recursion Error Python

I am trying to scrape some box scores from ESPN.com and put them in Pandas DataFrame. I have done similar things in the past in the same manner with out any problems. However in

Solution 1:

This exception from pickle.dump usually means that you're trying to pickle an object that contains itself (directly or indirectly).

But what object contains itself? When you print them all out, they all look fine.

It's awayTeam This is a bs4.element.NavigableString, which you get by doing this:

awayTeam = awayQTRScores[0]

You may not notice it from just print awayTeam or even print repr(awayTeam), because NavigableString is a subclass of unicode and doesn't define a custom __str__ or __repr__, so it prints just like a string.

But it also doesn't define a custom pickler, so it uses the default pickler. In general, bs4 objects aren't designed to be pickled, and many of them can't be. In particular, NavigableString is an object that indirectly contains itself. As the docs say:

If you want to use a NavigableString outside of Beautiful Soup, you should call unicode() on it to turn it into a normal Python Unicode string. If you don’t, your string will carry around a reference to the entire Beautiful Soup parse tree, even when you’re done using Beautiful Soup.

And of course the parse tree contains a reference to the string, which etc. So, this type can never be pickled.

The solution is simple. You wanted a plain old unicode string, not a NavigableString, so you can just do this:

awayTeam = unicode(awayQTRScores[0])