too many values with string.split

[Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch]

On Sat, 22 Sep 2007 17:00:47 -0400, Shawn Minisall wrote:

> I'm trying to unpack a list of 5 floats from a list read from a file and 
> python is telling me 5 variables are too many for the string.split 
> statement.

Please post the *real* message which I suspect is something like 'too many
values to unpack', which is the other way around.  The 5 names are not
enough to take all the items from the split.

>     #read in data line by line
>     for line in infile:
>         mylist = string.split(line)

Functions in the `string` module that are also available as methods on
strings are deprecated.

>         firstName[counter] = mylist[0]
>         lastName[counter] = mylist[1]
>         grades[counter] = float(mylist[2])
>         print firstName[counter], 
> lastName[counter],":","\t\t",grades[counter]
>         #increment counter
>         counter = counter + 1

Do you really need the counter?  Can't you just append the values to the
lists?

>     #calculates and prints average score
>     grades = str(grades)
>     num1, num2, num3, num4, num5 = string.split(grades,",")
>     average = float(num1 + num2 + num3 + num4 + num5) / 5

This is very strange.  You have a list of floats (I guess), convert that
list to a string, split that string at commas, concatenate the *strings*
between commas and then try to convert it to a `float`!?  This is likely
not what you want and should fail in most cases anyway.

Ciao,
	Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch