relplot error when using str as hue

When I am trying to use a string or categorical column within a dataframe as hue within a relplot we get the following error: AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'view'

Minimal example:

test_df = pd.DataFrame(
[{"a": 0.0, "b": 1.0, "c": "1", "d": "1"},
 {"a": 0.0, "b": 1.0, "c": "2", "d": "2"}]
)
g = sns.relplot(x="a", y="b", col="c",  hue="d", data=test_df)

[teckwanikaran]

This is my first time ever commenting on an open issue, so please be kind if I am wrong!

I was facing similar issues, till I referred to this post on stackoverflow

• Problem: I have about 16 unique numerical str values as id (like: ‘215’ ‘112233’, …)
• The fix: Use your palette size to be same as the unique numerical str values.
• example: sns.lineplot(data=df, x='x', y='y', hue='id', palette=sns.color_palette("Set1", 16))
• or sns.scatterplot(data=df, x='x', y='y', hue='id', palette=sns.color_palette("Set1", 16))

[mwaskom]

I think the problem here is that seaborn is duck typing whether the hue variable is categorical or numeric based on whether it can be converted to float without erroring, but then using the original data for getting the colors. Passing numerics as strings is kind of a weird corner case, but it shouldn’t be impossible. There’s a similar issue in PairGrid (#1347) and so a good general solution is needed.

I think in the meantime, a workaround would be to provide explicit colors values to the palette (either as a list or dictionary) which should skip the numeric color-mapping code;

test_df = pd.DataFrame(
[{"a": 0.0, "b": 1.0, "c": "1", "d": "1"},
 {"a": 0.0, "b": 1.0, "c": "2", "d": "2"}]
)
g = sns.relplot(x="a", y="b", col="c",  hue="d", palette=["r", "b"], data=test_df)