trictionary?

[mensanator at aol.com]

Steven Bethard wrote:
> Adam Tomjack wrote:
> > Steven Bethard wrote:
> > ...
> >> Using a two element list to store a pair of counts has a bad code
> >> smell to me.
> > ...
> >
> > Why is that?
>
> Note that "code smell"[1] doesn't mean that something is actually wrong,
> just that it might be.  In Python, pairs are usually handled with
> tuples[2], but tuples would be inconvenient in this case, since the
> first value must be modified.  Declaring a class with two attributes as
> you suggested is often a good substitute, but if the OP's code is really
> what it looks like, I get another code smell because declaring a class
> to be used by only 10 lines of code seems like overkill.
>
> I also get a code smell from a dict holding two-element lists because
> I've been writing in Python and answering questions on the Python-list
> for a couple of years now, and I've never needed one yet. ;-)
>
> STeVe
>
> [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_smell
> [2]http://www.python.org/doc/faq/general.html#why-are-there-separate-tuple-and-list-data-types

Could you do me a favor and see what this smells like?

I put some data in a csv file (with headers) and this will
bring it in quite simply as a dictionary with [names] as
keys and an attribute dictionary as the value.

py_monsters.csv:

name,hardiness,agility,friend,courage,room,weight,special_def_odds,armor,weapon,odds,dice,side,hits,reaction,desc
PIRATE,5,20,0,10,26,300,0,0,11,60,1,10,0,"not met",You see a man with a
beard and a brass ring in his ear.  He is wearing clothes  made of silk
and is wielding a very fancily engraved sword.


import csv
temp1 = []
temp2 = []
reader = csv.reader(file(r"py_monsters.csv"))
for rec in reader:
	temp1.append(rec)
for i in temp1[1:]:
	temp2.append((i[0],dict(zip(temp1[0][1:],i[1:]))))
monsters = dict(temp2)

This gives me what I want

[('PIRATE', {'reaction': 'not met',
'agility': '20',
'room': '26',
'weight': '300',
'armor': '0',
'weapon': '11',
'hits': '0',
'side': '10',
'special_def_odds': '0',
'courage': '10',
'hardiness': '5',
'desc': 'You see a man with a beard and a brass ring in his ear.
He is wearing clothes  made of silk and is wielding a very fancily
engraved sword.',
'odds': '60',
'friend': '0',
'dice': '1'})]

so that I can now write code like

if monsters['PIRATE']['reaction']=='not met':
        print monsters['PIRATE']['desc']

instead of using stupid index numbers.

But the loader seems to have a kind of perl-like odor to it,
i.e., next week I won't understand what it does.