Python dictionary syntax, need help

[Karl Scalet]

Crew Reynolds schrieb:
> I want to create a dictionary of note on/off timings and access it by
> the name of the object. The following code works for one row.
> 
> a = "Hammer1" 
> b = [5,45,45,45,45,50,55,57,59,61,60,59] 
> 
> notes = {a:b} 
> print notes["Hammer1"][3] 
> 
>>>>45 
> 
> 
> The problem is, I want to load the data from a file to populate
> variables a and b and build a dictionary for "Hammer1" thru
> "Hammer10". That way, I can stick the name of the object in the array
> index and receive a list of note timings that I can index with an
> ordinal as in the above example.
> 
> This is straight Python syntax but I'm hoping someone has done this or
> understands the syntax better than I.
> 
> Thanks! Alternative solutions to this concept would be greatly
> appreciated.

If there is no special format required for the text file, you could
invest a bit more in typing this text file, say, 'content.inp' like:

notes['hammer1'] = [1,2,3,4]
notes['hammer2'] = [2,3,4,5]
notes['hammer3'] = [3,4,5,6]
...

which on the other hand would simplify your code to:

...
notes = {}
execfile('content.inp')
# now notes is initialized with the content

I often do configurations/initialization stuff like this,
just using legal python syntax for such files.

Of course, my approach is not far from hardcoding the content
in the first place.

Karl