Question: I'm trying to write a code, which extracts timecodes from lines that start with "From". Example: "From stephen.marquard@uct.ac.za Sat Jan 5 09:14:16 2008" and then splits the timecode into hours and seconds.

```
fhand = open('mbox-short.txt')

for line in fhand :
    line = line.rstrip()
    if not line.startswith('From') : continue
    words = line.split()
    time = words[5:6]
    hrs = time.split(':')
    print(hrs[1])
    print(hrs[2])

```

When I'm compiling my code - I'm getting the traceback (Attribute Error: `'list' object has no attribute 'split'`). If I change my code to do the same for email:

```
fhand = open('mbox-short.txt')

for line in fhand :
    line = line.rstrip()
    if not line.startswith('From') : continue
    words = line.split()
    time = words[1]
    hrs = time.split('@')
    print(hrs[1])

```

everything is alright - the program works properly (splits emails into logins and domains). What's wrong with the first code?

Answer: 
Welcome to SO!

Firstly, lists have no property called 'split'. Strings do, though!

This means that in your first example, you're trying to split a list, but in the second example, you're splitting a string. This is because doing `words[5:6]` returns a list, but getting the first item from a list of strings returns a string. (`words[1]`)

If you want to convert a list to a string, consider using `"".join(mylist)`. Check out [this article on W3Schools](https://www.w3schools.com/python/ref_string_join.asp) for more info on how to use join.
As a previous person already said, you can't split list, the reason the fist code works is because you are splitting one element of the list, which is a string, what you could do iterate in each element of the time array to print all of them

```
fhand = open('mbox-short.txt')

for line in fhand :
    line = line.rstrip()
    if not line.startswith('From') : continue
    words = line.split()
    time = words[5:6]
    for elem in time:
        hrs = time.split(':')
        print(hrs[1])
        print(hrs[2])

```