Morse Code Decoder Fails on Consecutive Spaces and Special Characters

I’m building a Morse code encoder/decoder in Python and ran into an issue when decoding messages that contain multiple spaces or unsupported symbols.

The decoder works fine for simple inputs like:

… . .-… .-… —

which correctly outputs: HELLO

But when the input contains word separators or unexpected characters, the output becomes inconsistent.

Example problematic input: … . .-… .-… — .-- — .-. .-… -… @

Expected output: HELLO WORLD

Actual behavior:

• Extra spaces create empty decoded characters
• Unsupported symbols like @ break the parser
• Sometimes I get KeyError exceptions

Current decoding logic:

MORSE_CODE_DICT = { ‘.-’: ‘A’, ‘-…’: ‘B’, # … }

decoded = “”

for code in morse_input.split(" "): decoded += MORSE_CODE_DICT[code]

Questions:

What’s the best way to safely handle invalid Morse sequences? How should multiple spaces be interpreted when separating words? Is there a more robust parsing strategy for Morse code decoding in Python?

Any suggestions or best practices would be appreciated.