Question

I have a text file with entries that look like this :

JohnDoe

Assignment 9  
Reading: NO  
header: NO  
HW: NO  
Solutions: 0 
show: NO  
Journals: NO  
free: NO  
Finished: NO  
Quiz: 0  
Done     
Assignment 3  
E-book: NO  
HW: NO  
Readings: NO  
Show: 0  
Journal: NO 
Study: NO  
Test: NO  
Finished: NO  
Quiz: 0  
Done

This is a small sample. The file has several students in it. Each student has two assignments under their name and they only pass if the line that starts with “Finished” in each assignment reads “Finished: YES”. All of the data under each assignment is disorganized, but somewhere under each assignment a line will say “Finished: YES (or NO)” I need a way to read the file and say whether or not any of the students have passed. So far, I have

def get_entries( file ):
with open( "dicrete.txt.rtf", 'rt') as file:
    for line in file:
        if "Finished" in line:
            finished, answer = line.split(':')
            yield finished, answer

# dict takes a sequence of  `(key, value)` pairs and turns in into a dict
print dict(get_entries( file ))

I can only get this code to return a single entry (the first “Finished” it reads as key and “YES or NO” as value, which is what I want, but I want it to return Every line in the file that that starts with “Finished”. So the sample data I provided I want to return a dict with 2 entries {Finished:”NO” , Finished:”NO”}

Answer 1

Dictionaries can only store one mapping per key. So, you can never have a dictionary that has two different entries for the same key.

Consider using a list of two-tuples instead, like [("Finished", "NO"), ("Finished", "NO")].