Importing a dicrionary from a file
Wm. King
wjk at wjk.mv.com
Wed Jan 5 00:25:54 EST 2000
I am a relative newbie as well - I thought about this
before and had done something along similar lines
but not necessarily the best way:
Created a tab-delimited file (dict.txt) - with no blank lines:
--actually its a table--
a data something a
b data something b
c data something c
d data something d
then wrote program:
import string #import string module
fp = open("dict.txt","r") #open file
data = fp.readlines() #whole file as one variable
new = {} #created empty dictionary
foreach entry in data: #entry would be "a data"
stuff = string.split(entry,"\t") #split by tab (now 2 pieces)
new[stuff[0]] = stuff[1] #1st part is key 2nd is data
fp.close() #close file
new["a"] would print out data
1. if your keys are numbers just convert the string to a number for
dictionary key
2. if your file is going to be huge then I would seek an alternative way
3. make sure the separator in your file is a character not used anywhere
else... ( Field separator in awk lingo me thinks)
I hope I got this right! -- There is probably another way such as just
typing or creating a module with your dictionary in it and using that.
[So I will let the expert Pythonistas help further..... ] (c;{>*
Black Mantis wrote:
> hello
> I am a newbie, and i am working on a program that uses a really big
> dictionary. i was wondering if i could store the dictionary in a
> seperate file, let's say dict.dat. Now, at the beggining of the program
> i want to import that dictionary and get it ready, how would i do this?
> is there a way to read the whole input file into one variable?
>
> thanks for your help
> keagan
Black Mantis wrote:
> hello
> I am a newbie, and i am working on a program that uses a really big
> dictionary. i was wondering if i could store the dictionary in a
> seperate file, let's say dict.dat. Now, at the beggining of the program
> i want to import that dictionary and get it ready, how would i do this?
> is there a way to read the whole input file into one variable?
>
> thanks for your help
> keagan
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