Getting a "list index is out of range" for a simple list split

Question

I am trying to read lines from a txt document into a list, but I keep getting the message: IndexError: list index out of range. It points to the last line password = usersdoc1.strip() as the problem.

k = open(filename, 'r')

lines = k.readlines()

for line in lines:

    
    usersdoc=line.strip().split('-')

    username = usersdoc[0].strip()

    password = usersdoc[1].strip()

The document I am reading has a username and a password on each line separated by '-' and I am able to print username and password successfully, but when I run my full code I just get an error. I can't seem to figure out what the issue is. Here is the document I am reading

Answer 1

When your for loop reaches the line:

Jack

the function split('-') only returns a list with a single value: "Jack" Said list doesn't have an index of [1] because it only has one value, which is index [0].

To bypass this, you can do a couple things depending on how you want to handle it:

Ignore the line entirely:

for line in lines:
    usersdoc=line.strip().split('-')
    if len(usersdoc) !== 2:
        continue
    username = usersdoc[0].strip()
    password = usersdoc[1].strip()

Create an empty password:

for line in lines:
    usersdoc=line.strip().split('-')
    username = usersdoc[0].strip()
    password = usersdoc[1].strip() if usersdoc[1] else ""

Something I noticed that you may not have caught yet, because strip() comes before split(), your usernames and passwords can still have whitespace on either side if there's whitespace between the username/password and the dash.