[Tutor] Sort of database & "family tree" question

[ALAN GAULD]

> > And I assume you are reading these into a Person class and
> > storing these classes in a persons dictionary? 


> Can you explain this a little more for me please?


Sure. 
(I didn't notice this on gmane so apologies if others already answered)

> The current way of reading the data is this:
> 
> parser = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
> parser.read(personFile)
> 
> def get_info(person)
>    infoDic = {}
>    infoDic['first']      = parser.get(person, 'firstName')
>    infoDic['last']       = parser.get(person, 'lastName')
>    infoDic['father']   = parser.get(person, 'father')
>    infoDic['mother'] = parser.get(person, 'mother')
>    return infoDic

TYhis is almost the same but you are using a dict. A sligtly more readable version is to define a class Person:

class Person:
     def __init__(self, parser):
         self.first  = parser.get(person, 'firstName')
         self.last   = parser.get(person, 'lastName')
         self.father   = parser.get(person, 'father')
         self.mother = parser.get(person, 'mother')

Now you can create your person records with:

parser = ConfigParser.ConfifgParser()
parser.read(personFile)

people = {}
# some kind of loop here?
# for record in parser...
      p = Person(parser)
      people[p.first,p.last] = p

Now you will have a dictionary full of persons and you can access them 
by the first,last tuple of their name.

BUT how is father/mother stored? Is it a first/last tuple or some ID number? 
If an ID you need to add that to your Person definition and use it as the 
people key.

Does that help?

Alan G.