Question

I need to be able to search through the dictionary by zipcode but I keep getting a TypeError: sliced indices must be integers or None or have an __index__ method.
I’m not sure how to integrate the __index__ method.
Here is my code:

import sys
import csv
import re

dicts = []

def getzip():
    try:
        f = open("zips.csv")
        csvParser = csv.reader(f)
        for row in csvParser:
            dicts['zip code':row[0]] = {'latitude': row[2], 'longitude': row[3]}
            print dicts
    except ValueError:
        pass
getzip() 

If I swap in dicts = {'zip code': row[1],'latitude': row[2], 'longitude': row[3]}
everything works but it prints Latitude:xxxxx zipcode:xxxxx longitude:xxxxx and I need it to be structured by zipcode.

Answer 1

Your code is basically a syntax error. What are you trying to do with dicts['zip code':row[0]]?

Python thinks you’re using the slice operator, like you would to get a middle portion of a list like some_list[2:5] (which returns items from index 2 through index 4 of some_list). 'zip code' doesn’t work as a slice index, since it’s not a number.

I think you want to do:

dicts = {}

By declaring dicts with {} it’s a dictionary, so you can use your zip codes as keys.

Then:

     dicts[row[0]] = {'latitude': row[2], 'longitude': row[3]}

or perhaps

     zip_code = row[0]
     dicts[zip_code] = {'zip code': zip_code, 'latitude': row[2], 'longitude': row[3]}

You could then access the information for zip code 91010 with dicts['91010']:

>>> print dicts['91010']['latitude']
'-34.12N'