title: Python KeyError: '' for automatic language detection
body: <p>i'm doing an automatic language detection in python using stopwords</p>
  
  <p>but i'm getting KeyError when trying to test the code.
  this is the code</p>
  
  <pre><code>import nltk
  from nltk.corpus import stopwords
  
  def scoreFunction(wholetext):
      dictiolist={}
      scorelist={}
      NLTKlanguage = ["dutch","finnish","german","italian","portuguese","spanish","turkish","danish","english"," french","hungarian","norwegian","russian","swedish"]
      FREElanguages = [""]
      languages= NLTKlanguages + FREElanguages
      for lang in NLTKlanguages:
          dictiolist[lang]=stopwords.words(lang)
          tokens=nltk.tokenize.word_tokenize(wholetext)
          tokens=[t.lower() for t in tokens]
          freq_dist=nltk.FreqDist(tokens)
      for lang in languages:
          scorelist[lang]=0
      for word in freq_dist.keys()[0:20]:
          if word in dictiolist[lang]:
              scorelist[lang]+=1
      return scorelist
  
  def whichLanguage(scorelist):
      maximum=0
      for item in scorelist:
          value = scorelist[item]
          if maximum&lt;value:
              maximum = value
              lang = item
      return lang
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>whene i run it scoreFunction("hillo my name is osfar and i'm genius") 
  i get the error 
      Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in  </p>
  
  <pre><code>scoreFunction("hello my name is osfar and i'm very genius") 
  File "C:/Users/osama1/Desktop
  /fun-test", line 17, in scoreFunction 
  if word in dictiolist[lang]:
  KeyError: ''
  </code></pre>