Erorr in python using both split and while loop and external text file

Question

I'm new to Python and so am confused by the following "list index out of range" error I get with the following code as my text file only contains 4 items in it which are first name, last name, hourly salary, total hours worked. Should this be changed to something that's not a while loop? If need be I can give the entire code. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

while line2 != "":
    line2 = " "
    line2 = line2.split( " " )
    if (line2[ 0 ]+ " " + line2[ 1 ]) != name1.rstrip( " \n " ):
    empFile3.write(line2[ 0 ] + " " + line2[ 1 ] + " " + line2[ 2 ] + " " + line2[ 3 ] + " \n " )

Ashok Krishna · Accepted Answer · 2020-07-20 15:29:39Z

1

The problem is in line no. 2. Remove that. You are getting that error because you are trying to split an empty string.

while line2 != "":
    line2 = line2.split( " " )
    if (line2[ 0 ]+ " " + line2[ 1 ]) != name1.rstrip( " \n " ):
       empFile3.write(line2[ 0 ] + " " + line2[ 1 ] + " " + line2[ 2 ] + " " + line2[ 3 ] + " \n " )

answered Jul 20, 2020 at 15:29

Ashok Krishna

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4 Comments

missalimcd Over a year ago

Hi and thank you. I removed line no. 2 and am still getting the error. Should I be using a "for" loop instead? Sorry in advance for the newbie question.

missalimcd Over a year ago

Sorry, am getting the following error, "'list' object has no attribute 'split".

Ashok Krishna Over a year ago

You cannot split a list object. Split can only be used on a string. If you have a list of string them loop over the list and use split. For example: [x.split(" ") for x in list]

missalimcd Over a year ago

Thank you, Ashok. I'm new to Python and am trying to make sense of it all. Thank you for your example, that helps out a lot.

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