Assigning variables to parts of a text file

Question

I have a line from a text file that goes as follows:

[41.298669629999999, -81.915329330000006] 6 2011-08-28 19:02:36 Work needs to fly by ... I'm so excited to see Spy Kids 4 with then love of my life ... ARREIC

I am trying to assign different parts of this line to specific variables with this code:

latitude = 0
longitude = 0
unused1 = 0
unused2 = 0
unused3 = 0
tweetWordList = []
for line in tweetFile:
    line = line.rstrip()
    longitude,latitude,unused1,unused2,unused3,tweetWordList = line.split()

I am trying to get the chunk of text from the tweet into the tweetWordList but I get an error saying that there are too many values to unpack. How do I divide this line so that the writing goes into the list I created?

I already read in the file and the rest of the program to this point works fine.

Answer 1

It's because you're splitting on spaces, so all of the text gets split into list items as well. If the formatting is consistent, I'd suggest splitting on list indices:

>>> line = "[41.298669629999999, -81.915329330000006] 6 2011-08-28 19:02:36 Work needs to fly by ... I'm so excited to see Spy Kids 4 with then love of my life ... ARREIC"
>>> splitline = line.split()
>>> longitude = splitline[0].replace('[', '').replace(',', '')
>>> latitude = splitline[1].replace(']', '')
>>> tweetWordList = ' '.join(splitline[5:])

Alternatively, you could do it with a regex pattern:

>>> import re
>>> latitude, longitude, tweetWordList = re.findall("^\[([\d.]+), ([\d\-.]+)\] [\d] [\d]{4}-[\d]{2}-[\d]{2} [\d]{2}:[\d]{2}:[\d]{2} ([A-Za-z0-9 .']+)", line)[0]

You'll need to play around with the regex pattern to match your text properly, but that's the gist of it.