Text component dictated by values in excel procedure file not working

Builder
1

OS (e.g. Win10): Win11
PsychoPy version (e.g. 2024.2.4 Py 3.8): 2024.1.5
Standard Standalone Installation? (y)
Do you want it to also run online? (y)

What are you trying to achieve?:

I have a self-timed reading task where participants hit space when they have read a chunk / segment of a story. There are many stories in the procedure file, which are allocated by the variable ‘Code_practise’ in the procedure file. For each story, there are two versions. The version the participant sees depends on their experimental group, allocated by the variable ‘condition’ which is set by a coin toss at the start of the experiment.

The story is displayed one chunk at a time - to do this I have the following code:

# assemble whole story & note which chunk is crit chunk

story_practise = ""
n_chunks_practise = 0
current_chunk_practise = 0
chunks_practise=[]

# every story has a context
story_practise = Context_practise

if Number_of_pre_sentence_chunks_practise == 0:
    n_chunks_practise = 1
elif Number_of_pre_sentence_chunks_practise == 1:
    story_practise += "\t" + Pre_sentence_chunk1_practise
    n_chunks_practise = 2
elif Number_of_pre_sentence_chunks_practise == 2:
    story_practise += "\t" + Pre_sentence_chunk1_practise + "\t" + Pre_sentence_chunk2_practise
    n_chunks_practise = 3
elif Number_of_pre_sentence_chunks_practise == 3:
    story_practise += "\t" + Pre_sentence_chunk1_practise + "\t" + Pre_sentence_chunk2_practise + "\t" + Pre_sentence_chunk3_practise
    n_chunks_practise = 4

if Number_of_target_sentence_chunks_practise == 1:
    story_practise += "\t" + Target_sentence_chunk1_practise
    n_chunks_practise = n_chunks_practise + 1
elif Number_of_target_sentence_chunks_practise == 2:
    story_practise += "\t" + Target_sentence_chunk1_practise + "\t" + Target_sentence_chunk2_practise
    n_chunks_practise = n_chunks_practise + 2

# group A 1-27 as idioms, and 28 - 54 literal
# reversed for group B
if (group == "A" and Code_practise <= 1027) or (group == 'B' and Code_practise > 1027):
    condition = 'i'
    story_practise += "\t" + KEY_sentence_chunk_IDIOM_practise
    n_chunks_practise = n_chunks_practise + 1
    crit_chunk_practise = n_chunks_practise
elif (group == "B" and Code_practise <= 1027) or (group == 'A' and Code_practise > 1027):
    condition = 'l'
    story_practise += "\t" + KEY_sentence_chunk_LITERAL_practise
    n_chunks_practise = n_chunks_practise + 1
    crit_chunk_practise = n_chunks_practise

if Number_of_concluding_chunks_practise == 1:
    story_practise += "\t" + concluding_chunk1_practise
    n_chunks_practise = n_chunks_practise + 1
elif Number_of_concluding_chunks_practise == 2:
    story_practise += "\t" + concluding_chunk1_practise + "\t" + concluding_chunk2_practise
    n_chunks_practise = n_chunks_practise + 2

chunks_practise = story_practise.split("\t")

thisExp.addData('condition', condition)
thisExp.addData('group', group)

When I run this, the first chunk of the story is displayed, then when the second chunk should be displayed the experiment crashes and I get the following error message:

“if (group == “A” and Code_practise <= 1027) or (group == ‘B’ and Code_practise > 1027):
TypeError: ‘>’ not supported between instances of ‘NoneType’ and ‘int’”

What did you try to make it work?:

To test whether the variable ‘Code_practise’ is being allocated a value at all, I inserted a text object with $Code_practise. The correct value appeared on screen.

Link to the most relevant existing thread you have found:

What specifically went wrong when you tried that?:
if (group == “A” and Code_practise <= 1027) or (group == ‘B’ and Code_practise > 1027):
TypeError: ‘>’ not supported between instances of ‘NoneType’ and ‘int’
################# Experiment ended with exit code 1 [pid:8048] #################

2

Code_practise is coming up as NoneType (i.e. missing).

To me this implies a blank row in your spreadsheet, or an attempt to access Code_practise in Begin Experiment or before the loop starts. Is the code you have displayed in Begin Experiment?

3

It seems that, for some reason, the code didn’t like the fact that in some trials some of the columns had no entries. I fixed it in the end by changing the way it was built to include more builder components and simplified code - it’s annoyingly inefficient, but it works!

4

I quite often put x in a cell instead of blank and then have code like:

if spreadsheetImage == 'x':
     thisImage = 'transparent.png'
else:
    thisImage = spreadsheetImage

Reusing routines and components is good practice.