Question

I am new to python and programming in general. I looked at a lot of questions about dictionaries, lists, map, lambda, list comprehensions, etc., but I cannot seem to put a specific function together to build the dictionary that I want.

I can describe the dictionary that I want to produce as follows:

    #goal: make a dictionary that describes a form

    FORMNAME = 'aspnetForm'
    nicks = ['username','password','submit'] #nicknames I want to use
    names = [FIELD_USERNAME, FIELD_PWD, BUTTON_LOGIN] #field names
    values =  ['myusername','mypass',''] #field values
    types =  ['text', 'password', 'submit'] #control types

    INPUTS = [{nicks[0]:{'name':names[0],'value':values[0],'type':types[0]}},
    {nicks[1]:{'name':names[1],'value':values[1],'type':types[1]}},
    {nicks[2]:{'name':names[2],'value':values[2],'type':types[2]}}]

    LOGINFORM = {'name':FORMNAME, 'input':INPUTS} #this is the final dictionary I want to build

Please, impress me with the simplicity and elegance of the best python method to build LOGINFORM so that I may learn!

I want to use this dictionary to populate a form in mechanize. It’s the only form I need to populate. I can populate this form the “long” way, but I wanted to learn how to populate it in a systematic way with a dictionary.

My main purpose here is to learn how to populate dictionaries. But I thank you in advance for not suggesting a better way until I learn how to answer my own question.

Answer 1

You can make use of zip:

LOGINFORM = {'name': FORMNAME, 'input':
     [{nick: {'name': name, 'value': value, 'type': sort}}
       for nick, name, value, sort in zip(nicks, names, values, types)]}

I’m avoiding the use of type as variable name, because it’s a builtin function/type, but actually you can use it here just fine.