Reading a CSV file into a list of dictionaries

[Peter Otten]

RFQ wrote:

> I have a comma delimited file where each line in the file is something
> like:
> 
> PNumber,3056,Contractor,XYZ Contracting,Architect,ABC Architects,...
> 
> So each line is intended to be: key1,value1,key2,value2,key3,value3...
> and each line is to be variable in length (although it will have to be
> an even number of records so that each key has a value).
> 
> I want to read in this csv file and parse it into a list of
> dictionaries. So each record in the list is a dictionary:
> 
> {"PNumber":"3056","Contractor":"XYZ Contracting", ... }

>>> row
['PNumber', '3056', 'Contractor', 'XYZ Contracting', 'Architect', 'ABC']
>>> dict(zip(row[::2], row[1::2]))
{'Architect': 'ABC', 'PNumber': '3056', 'Contractor': 'XYZ Contracting'}

A bit more elegant:

>>> irow = iter(row)
>>> dict(zip(irow, irow))
{'Architect': 'ABC', 'PNumber': '3056', 'Contractor': 'XYZ Contracting'}

Peter