Question

I have got an existing menu that gives you options L or D. L should load the contents of a file and D should display it.

if option == "l" or option == "L":
    with open("packages.txt") as infp:
        for line in infp:
         line = line.rstrip()
         name,adult,child= line.split(',')

if option == "d" or option == "D":
    print ((name)," - ",(adult)," / ",(child))

However, when I try to run this I get the error:

name,adult,child= line.split(‘,’)
ValueError: need more than 1 value to unpack

Why do I get this error?

Answer 1

This means that there is a line in packages.txt that, when you strip whitespace and split on commas, doesn’t give exactly three pieces. In fact, it seems that it gives only 1 piece (“need more than 1 value to unpack”), which suggests that there’s a line with no commas at all.

Perhaps there are blank or comment lines in packages.txt?

You may need your code to be smarter about parsing the contents of the file.