Question

I am attempting to run a python program that can run a dictionary from a file with a list of words with each word given a score and standard deviation. My program looks like this:

theFile = open('word-happiness.csv' , 'r')

theFile.close()

def make_happiness_table(filename):
   '''make_happiness_table: string -> dict
      creates a dictionary of happiness scores from the given file'''
   with open(filename) as f:
      d = dict( line.split('    ')  for line in f)
   return d

make_happiness_table("word-happiness.csv")

table = make_happiness_table("word-happiness.csv")
(score, stddev) = table['hunger']
print("the score for 'hunger' is %f" % score)

My .csv file is in the form

word{TAB}score{TAB}standard_deviation

and I am trying to create the dictionary in that way. How can I create such a dictionary so that I can print a word such as ‘hunger’ from the function and get its score and std deviation?

Answer 1

def make_happiness_table(filename):
   with open(filename) as f:
      d = dict()
      for line in f:
         word,score,std = line.split() #splits on any consecutive runs of whitspace
         d[word]=score,std # May want to make floats:  `d[word] = float(score),float(std)`
   return d

Note that if your word can have a tab character in it, but you’re guaranteed that you only have 3 fields (word, score, std), you can split the string from the right (str.rsplit), only splitting twice (resulting in 3 fields at the end). e.g. word,score,std = line.rsplit(None,2).

As mentioned in the comments above, you can also use the csv module to read these sorts of files — csv really shines if your fields can be “quoted”. e.g.:

"this is field 0" "this is field 1" "this is field 2"

If you don’t have that scenario, then I find that str.split works just fine.

---

Also, unrelated, but your code calls make_happiness_table twice (the first time you don’t assign the return value to anything). The first call is useless (all it does is read the file and build a dictionary which you can never use). Finally, opening and closeing theFile at the beginning of your script is also just a waste since you don’t do anything with the file there.