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Date: Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:58:25 -0500
From: Dave Angel <d@davea.name>
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To: Sammy Danso <samdansobe@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: iterating over list with one mising value
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On 02/07/2012 03:23 PM, Sammy Danso wrote:
>
Please don't top-post. It hopelessly mixes responses out of order.
>
> Hi Expert,
> Thanks for your responses and help. thought I should provide more information for clarity.
>
> Please find the error message below for more information
>
>     for (key, value) in wordFreq2:
> ValueError: need more than 1 value to unpack

That's not the complete error message;  it's missing the call stack. 
And also missing the line that's getting the ValueError.

>
> this is a sample of my data
>
> ['with', 3, 'which', 1, 'were', 2, 'well', 1, 'water', 1, 'was', 4, 'two', 1, 'to', 2, 'through', 1, 'thlabour', 1, 'these', 1, 'theat', 1, 'the', 8, 'tetanus', 1, 'started', 1, 'size', 1, 'scent', 1, 'respectively', 1, 'received', 1, 'problems', 2, 'prince', 1, 'pregnancy', 1, 'poured', 1, 'peace', 1, 'pains', 1, 'painless', 1, 'out', 1, 'of', 1, 'noseat', 1, 'nose', 2, 'no', 2, 'maternity', 1, 'malformation', 1, 'made', 1, 'lower', 1, 'labour/delivery', 2, 'kintampo', 1, 'into', 1, 'injections', 1, 'in', 3, 'i', 2, 'hospital', 1, 'home', 1, 'him', 1, 'having', 1, 'had', 2, 'green', 1, 'gave', 1, 'flowing', 2, 'encountered', 1, 'eleven', 1, 'during', 3, 'district', 1, 'difficulty', 1, 'cord', 1, 'consecutive', 1, 'colour', 1, 'cleared', 1, 'child', 1, 'checkups', 1, 'came', 1, 'but', 2, 'breathing', 2, 'breath', 1, 'blood', 2, 'bleeding', 1, 'birth', 4, 'before', 1, 'bad', 1, 'average', 1, 'at', 2, 'assist', 1, 'artificial', 1, 'around', 2, 'antenatal',
>   1, 'and', 5, 'an', 1, 'ambrical', 1, 'air', 1, 'abdominal', 1, '600am', 1, '100pm', 1, '', 3, 'other']
>
> What I would like to do is to pad the last value 'other' with a default so I can iterate sucessfully

OK, good.  If you know your error is always at the end, and you know the 
data to be padded, then just do it:

if len(mylist) % 2 > 0:
      mylist.append(0)

>
> my desired ouput is the format below in a text file.
> with 3
> which 3
> were 2
> ..
> .
> .
> other
>
>
> Thanks again.
> Sammy

My guess is that you have an entirely different problem, unrelated to 
the missing value at the end.  But you don't show us enough code to help 
you. How many items of the list are processed before the exception happens?

-- 

DaveA