Question

I have a textfile that looks like this:

Thomas Edgarson, Berliner Str 4, 13359 Berlin
Madeleine Jones, Müller Str 5, 15992 Karlsruhe
etc...

It’s always two words, followed by a comma, then two words and number, comma, area code and city. There are no exceptions.

I used

f=open("C:\\Users\\xxxxxx\\Desktop\\useradresses.txt", "r")
text=f.readlines()
f.close()

So now I have a list of all the columns. How can I now search for the area codes in these strings. I need to create a dictionary that looks like this

{'13359':[('Neuss','Wolfgang'),('Juhnke','Harald')]}

Believe me, I’ve searched, but couldn’t find useful information. To me, the whole idea of searching for something like an arbitray area code in a string is new and I haven’t come across it so far.

I would be happy if you could give me some pointers as to where I should look for tutorials or give me an idea where to start.

Answer 1

dic = {}
with open('filename') as file:
    for name, addr, zcode in (i.split(',') for i in file if i.rstrip()):
        dic.setdefault(zcode.split()[0], []).append(name.split())

Further explanation as Sjoerd asked:

Using a generator expression to break each line in 3 variables: name, addr and zcode. Then I split zcode in the desired number and used it as a dictionary key.

As the dict may not have the key yet, I use the setdefault method and that sets the key with a empty list before appending the splitted name.