Thank you for your assistance.
I believe I have finally cracked the problem. The file I was using was downloaded, and evidently there is some kind of character attached to the words that is messing up either chomp or reading it period. When I delete a word manually in gedit and retype it then save the file. That word will succesfully load a keyvalue, however all the other words won't. I'm going to attempt to read all the lines into an array and write them back as raw data to fix the file.