Question

I have a text file containing 5 columns of data. The first column contains names and the following 4 are filled with numbers. How can I import the text file and convert each row into a dictionary item with the key as the name in the first column and the return value as the value in the third column?

Cheers

Answer 1

Assuming the columns are delimited by whitespace, you can do

d = {}
with open("input") as f:
    for line in f:
        key, dummy, dummy, value, dummy = line.split()
        d[key] = float(value)