[Tutor] python equivalent to perl hash slices?

[Bill Campbell]

Is there a python equivalent to perl's hash slices which I use extensively
to simplify jobs such as parsing tabular data.  As an example, in perl I
might handle a file where the first line of the file is a tab delimited set
of column names, with something like this:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

my $line1 = <>; # get first line of input
chomp($line1);
my @fields = split("\n", $line);
my @outlist = qw(field1 field2);
my %record;
while(<>) {
	chomp;
	@record{@fields} = split("\n");
	# %record is now a hash (dictionary) with keys in the order
	# specified in the first line.
	print join("\t", @record(@outlist)) . "\n";
	# This prints only the members of the %record dictionary
	# with the keys specified in @outlist
}
__END__

I now use this extensively with mysql and postgresql database functions to
write generic classes based on table metadata, and to do conversions of
data from other sources (e.g. ancient Unify RDBMS SQL output).

Bill
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