[URGENT] ValueError: could not convert string to float: 'blue'

Builder
,
1

OS: Win10
PsychoPy version: v2021.1.2
**Standard Standalone?:y
**What are you trying to achieve?: All I’m trying to do is get the code to randomize text colour for each randomized word

**What did you try to make it work?: I tried a lot – $WordColour, $WordColour($cur_colour), I tried putting WordColour = [‘blue’,‘red’] because I’m only using blue and red

What specifically went wrong when you tried that?:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “C:\Users\Cooco\Desktop\CO_productioneffects_test_lastrun.py”, line 1806, in
mctext.setColor(WordColour, colorSpace=‘rgb’)
File “C:\Program Files\PsychoPy3\lib\site-packages\psychopy\visual\basevisual.py”, line 514, in setColor
self.setForeColor(color, colorSpace=colorSpace, operation=operation, log=log)
File “C:\Program Files\PsychoPy3\lib\site-packages\psychopy\visual\basevisual.py”, line 503, in setForeColor
self.foreColor = color
File “C:\Program Files\PsychoPy3\lib\site-packages\psychopy\visual\basevisual.py”, line 353, in foreColor
self._foreColor = Color(value, self.colorSpace)
File “C:\Program Files\PsychoPy3\lib\site-packages\psychopy\colors.py”, line 245, in init
self.set(color=color, space=space)
File “C:\Program Files\PsychoPy3\lib\site-packages\psychopy\colors.py”, line 334, in set
color, space = self.validate(color, space)
File “C:\Program Files\PsychoPy3\lib\site-packages\psychopy\colors.py”, line 291, in validate
self.alpha = color[:, 1]
File “C:\Program Files\PsychoPy3\lib\site-packages\psychopy\colors.py”, line 440, in alpha
value = float(value)
ValueError: could not convert string to float: ‘blue’

Sometimes it would say could not convert string to float: ‘red’ but whatever I put into the excel sheet doesn’t change it either, hex codes don’t work and rgb codes don’t work either :frowning:

2

It looks like the colour is being set to a list containing blue and red rather than being set to either blue or red - so it thinks you’re specifying a named colour “red” accompanied by an alpha value of “blue”. Are you putting each different colour in its own row on the Excel sheet, or both in the same cell?

3

I put 1 colour per cell. The error always switches between blue and red so I’m unsure.

4

How are you putting red and blue in your Excel file? Just the text?

How are you setting the colour of the word? Is it just by putting a $ followed by the Excel column title?

I randomise colours of Stroop stimuli in code, for which I use variables set to different colours (to facilitate it working online)

For example in Begin Experiment
blue=[-1,-1,1]
red=[1,-1,-1]
colours =[[red,’left”],[blue,”right”]]

Then in Begin Routine
shuffle(colours)
word.setColor(colours[0][0])
corrAns=colours[0][1]
thisExp.addData(‘Answer’,corrAns)

The actual code I use is slightly more involved but hopefully this gets across the gist