a couple of newbie questions

[Joseph Paish]

i am in the process of converting a perl script to python and have a couple of questions :

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1.  is there a way to comment out a large block of code in python?  the reason i ask is that i would
like to comment out the entire perl script and convert it piece by piece into python, uncommenting
each function as it is converted so i can test if it does what i want.

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2.  is there a way to read a datafile whose records are space separated so that the second field
becomes the key to a dictionary and the value portion is the entire record.  for example,

01/01/2003 abc 1234.56 789.98 12332.98 <<< the original record

the key would be : abc
the value would be : 01/01/2003 abc 1234.56 789.98 12332.98

i have managed to read the datafile into a list of lists and would like to loop through this
collection of records and convert it to a list of dictionaries keyed on the second field.  i have
already looked everywhere i can think of, but i haven't had any luck finding how to convert a list
of lists into dictionaries.

an alternative would be to bypass the list of lists altogether and populate the dictionary as i read
each record.  this would be even simpler.

suggestions?

thanks

joe