File to dict

[mrkafk at gmail.com]

Hello everyone,

I have written this small utility function for transforming legacy
file to Python dict:


def lookupdmo(domain):
        lines = open('/etc/virtual/domainowners','r').readlines()
        lines = [ [y.lstrip().rstrip() for y in x.split(':')] for x in
lines]
        lines = [ x for x in lines if len(x) == 2 ]
        d = dict()
        for line in lines:
                d[line[0]]=line[1]
        return d[domain]

The /etc/virtual/domainowners file contains double-colon separated
entries:
domain1.tld: owner1
domain2.tld: own2
domain3.another: somebody
...

Now, the above lookupdmo function works. However, it's rather tedious
to transform files into dicts this way and I have quite a lot of such
files to transform (like custom 'passwd' files for virtual email
accounts etc).

Is there any more clever / more pythonic way of parsing files like
this? Say, I would like to transform a file containing entries like
the following into a list of lists with doublecolon treated as
separators, i.e. this:

tm:$1$aaaa$bbbb:1010:6::/home/owner1/imap/domain1.tld/tm:/sbin/nologin

would get transformed into this:

[ ['tm', '$1$aaaa$bbbb', '1010', '6', , '/home/owner1/imap/domain1.tld/
tm', '/sbin/nologin'] [...] [...] ]