Question

I have a file that I’m working with. I want to create a function that reads the files and place the contents into a dictionary. Then that dictionary needs to be passed through the main function. Here is the main program. It cannot be changed. Everything I do must work with the main program.

def main():
    sunspot_dict = {}
    file_str = raw_input("Open what data file: ")
    keep_going = True
    while keep_going:
        try:
            init_dictionary(file_str, sunspot_dict)
        except IOError:
            print "Data file error, try again"
            file_str = raw_input("Open what data file: ")    
            continue
        print "Jan, 1900-1905:", avg_sunspot(sunspot_dict, (1900,1905),(1,1))
        print "Jan-June, 2000-2011:", avg_sunspot(sunspot_dict, (2000,2011), (1,6))
        print "All years, Jan:", avg_sunspot(sunspot_dict, month_tuple=(1,1))
        print "All months, 1900-1905:", avg_sunspot(sunspot_dict, year_tuple=(1900,1905))
        try:
            print "Bad Year Key example:", avg_sunspot(sunspot_dict, (100,1000), (1,1))
        except KeyError:
            print "Bad Key raised"
        try:
            print "Bad Month Index example:", avg_sunspot(sunspot_dict, (2000,2011), (1,100))
        except IndexError:
            print "Bad Range raised"
        keep_going = False
    print "Main function finished normally."

    print sunspot_dict

Here is what I have so far:

def init_dictionary(file_str, sunspot_dict):
    line = open(file_str, "rU")
    sunspot_dict = {}
    for i in line:
        sunspot_dict[i]
print sunspot_dict

Answer 1

Based on your second comment and your preview code, you are on the right track. Dictionaries in Python are passed by reference, so you should just be able to fill the dictionary provided to init_dictionary and the values will be accessible in main(). In your case you are creating a new dictionary in init_dictionary with the line sunspot_dict = {}. You don’t want to do this, because the dictionary you want to use was already created in main().

At this point we would need to know the format of the file you are reading. Basically you need to open the file, then probably read it line by line while parsing the lines into key/value pairs and filling sunspot_dict.