ValueError: too many values to unpack (Python 2.7)

Question

values = data.split("x00")

username, passwordHash, startRoom, originUrl, bs64encode = values
if len(passwordHash)!= 0 and len(passwordHash)!= 64:
        passwordHash = ""
if passwordHash != "":
        passwordHash = hashlib.sha512(passwordHash).hexdigest()
username = username.replace("<", "")
if len(startRoom) > 200:
        startRoom = ""
startRoom = self.roomNameStrip(startRoom, "2").replace("<","").replace("&amp;#", "&amp;amp;#")
self.login(username, passwordHash, startRoom, originUrl)  


Error:
username, passwordHash, startRoom, originUrl, bs64encode = values
ValueError: too many values to unpack

Answer 1

Check the output of

print len(values)

It has more than 5 values (which is the number of variables you are trying to "unpack" it to) which is causing your "too many values to unpack" error:

username, passwordHash, startRoom, originUrl, bs64encode = values

If you want to ignore the tail end elements of your list, you can do the following:

#assuming values has a length of 6
username, passwordHash, startRoom, originUrl, bs64encode, _ = values

or unpack only the first 5 elements (thanks to @JoelCornett)

#get the first 5 elements from the list
username, passwordHash, startRoom, originUrl, bs64encode = values[:5]