Why, TypeError: expected string or bytes-like object ?

[bowlofred]

You're passing v_inp as the string to examine for a pattern match via re.search(). But what you've posted doesn't show where that comes from (the actual function call). If what is passed in is not a string, then regex method will not like it.

>>> s1 = "foobar"  # a string
>>> s2 = 85        # not a string
>>> re.search(r"foo", s1)
<_sre.SRE_Match object; span=(0, 3), match='foo'>
>>> re.search(r"foo", s2)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/re.py", line 182, in search
    return _compile(pattern, flags).search(string)
TypeError: expected string or bytes-like object

You could possibly force it by coercing it to a string, but it's probably better to see what's calling it and if it's passing the right object.

>>> re.search(r"foo", str(s2))
>>>