When I saw this post, I thought: oh gosh this looks familiar. Anon Monk has given us a link to another post that looks virtually identical.

If you are working on homework, a better strategy would be to "come clean" about it (admit it). And then ask a general question about the technique that you attempting rather than asking: "what's wrong with my homework code"?

In this case, you are wondering about how to parse the input and extract some info. But that isn't the way that the question is framed.

I guess if you are trying to "cheat", you at least need to become smarter about how you do it!

Asking a general question about a specific technique is not "cheating" and will often generate a lot of responses especially if you have some working code albeit awkward. Ask a "how do I approach problem X?" question rather than a "please fix my homework" question.