Question

I am new to python and am trying to grasp a few things. I would like to create a dictionary from two lists. I have two sets of data:

Person  |    Name
--------|--------
1       |   Jimmy
2       |    Mike
3       | Stanley
4       |    Will

I have both of these in lists, one called “person” and one called “name”. I do this in a script which runs through multiple files to pull the data. each list is a different length with different data in it. Essentially, what I want to do is print the data as like this:

1 \t Jimmy
2 \t Mike
3 \t Stanley
4 \t Will

I pull the data from an xml file and here is the code I use to pull the data:

for people in xml.iter('people'):
  person.append(people.find('person').text)
  name.append(people.find('name').text)

So far the script works great and I can print out the two lists separately. What I don’t know how to do is print them out together and so my thought is to store them to a dictionary instead, but I don’t really know how to do that.

Answer 1

If you just want to print the two lists you can use zip (doc)

for num,name in zip(num_list,name_list):
    print str(num) + '\t' + name

you can use the same form to put the pairs in a dictionary (after you have the lists)

name_dict = {}
for num,name in zip(num_list,name_list):
    name_dict[num] = name

and then print

for num,name in name_dict.iteritems():
    print str(num) + '\t' + name