'too many values to unpack', iterating over a dict. key=>string, value=>list

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00:00 Question
00:28 Accepted answer (Score 574)
01:07 Answer 2 (Score 88)
01:23 Answer 3 (Score 39)
01:55 Answer 4 (Score 13)
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Full question
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5466...

Accepted answer links:
[items()]: http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes....
[iteritems()]: http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes....
[this answer]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/3294899/1489...
[iteritems()]: https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.0.h...

Answer 2 links:
[items]: https://docs.python.org/3.4/library/stdt...

Answer 3 links:
[iteritems]: http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes....

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Tags
#python

#avk47

ACCEPTED ANSWER

for field, possible_values in fields.items():
    print(field, possible_values)

for field, possible_values in fields.iteritems():
    print field, possible_values

See this answer for more information on iterating through dictionaries, such as using items(), across Python versions.

For Python 3.x iteritems has been removed. Use items instead.

for field, possible_values in fields.items():
    print(field, possible_values)

You want to use iteritems. This returns an iterator over the dictionary, which gives you a tuple(key, value)

>>> for field, values in fields.iteritems():
...     print field, values
... 
first_names ['foo', 'bar']
last_name ['gravy', 'snowman']

Your problem was that you were looping over fields, which returns the keys of the dictionary.

>>> for field in fields:
...     print field
... 
first_names
last_name

For lists, use enumerate

for field, possible_values in enumerate(fields):
    print(field, possible_values)

iteritems will not work for list objects