Question

I need to parse a the following list format into a dict.

This represents 2 people, with 3 pieces of data for each person, firstname, lastname, & email.

data = [3, 'firstname', 'lastname', 'email', 2, 'jack', 'black', '[e-mail]', 'jane', 'green', '[e-mail]']

data[0] is how many people fields are being sent. (3)

The next 3 items are the property names.

Before the actual person data starts, the 2 represents how many people are to follow.

I’m new to Python and I’m wondering if there’s a slick way to do this. I feel like there’s got to be a better way.

(untested code, just showing the only way i can think to approach it)

def formatPeople(self, data):
  param_count = data[0]
  keys = []
  pos = 1
  while pos <= param_count:
    keys.append(data[pos])
    pos += 1;

  people_count = int(data[pos])
  pos += 1
  people = []

  i = 0
  while i < people_count:
    people_data = {}
    for x in keys:
        people_data[keys[x]] = data[pos]
        pos += 1

    people.append(people_data)
  return people

Answer 1

That’s a good list to use iterators:

>>> i = iter(data)
>>> attr = [next(i) for x in range(next(i))]
>>> [{x:next(i) for x in attr} for y in range(next(i))]
[{'lastname': 'black', 'email': '[e-mail]', 'firstname': 'jack'}, {'lastname': 'green', 'email': '[e-mail]', 'firstname': 'jane'}]