Newbie query - reading text file (with column headings) into dictionary

[Andy Elvey]

Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> wrote in message
news:x7isy5qt4u.fsf at guru.mired.org...
> "Andy Elvey" <andy.elvey at paradise.net.nz> writes:
> > Hi all.
> >   I have a text file (comma separated) which looks like this -
> >  Country, City,  Var1, Var2, Var3
> >  Australia, Sydney, 123,456,789
> >  Australia, Perth, 415, 201, 142
> >  .... and so on.
>
> There's actually an RFC that describes this file format. It's called
> "Comma Separated Values". The other common alternative is Tab
> Seperated Values.
>
> >   I want to read the file into a dictionary so that the column headings
> > (Country, city ,... ) are the keys, and the rest of the file is slotted
into
> > the appropriate key ( so that "Australia" has "Country" as the key,
"Sydney"
> > and "Perth" have "City" as the key, and so on.  This must be quite
> > straightforward to do, but searching the 'net (including the Python
Cookbook
> > site) turns up nothing along these lines .... So - any help is very much
> > appreciated.
>
> Your problem isn't sufficiently well defined.  A dictionary lookup by
> key returns a single value. But you have both Sydney and Perth "have"
> the key "City". Given that the resulting dictionary is D, what would
> D["City"] return?
>
> You either want a list of dictionaries, or for the dictionary to
> return a list of items. Calling the result R, those would correspond
> to R[0]["City"] == "Sydney" and R[1]["City"] == "Perth", or R["City"]
> == ["Sydney", "Perth"]. In the latter case, what would R["Country"]
> return? ["Australia"], or ["Australia", "Australia"].
>
>         <mike
  Hi, Mike - thanks for this :-)  ( and apologies for not having clarified
things more ).
   I'm wanting your second option - for the dictionary to return a list of
items.
   So, the keys and their values would be as follows -

  Key = "Country"  Value = ['Australia', 'Australia']
  Key= "City"  Value = ['Sydney' , 'Perth']
  Key = Var1 Value = [ 123, 415]
  Key = Var2  Value = [456, 201 ]
  Key = Var3 Value = [789, 142 ]
  - Andy