Question

I’m trying to load a specific key from a dictionary, with keys like “character 1”, “translation 1”, etc. (I’m working a a flashcard program for my chinese studies). First, I load the dictionary flawlessly from a .txt file with

f = codecs.open(('%s.txt' % list_name),'r','utf-8')
quiz_list = eval(f.read())

Then, I want the program to print the list in order, so that I would get something along the lines of

"1. ('character 1' value)    ('pinyin 1' value)    ('translation 1' value)"

The program registers how many entries the list has and calculates the amount of chinese words it has to show (with each word having its own character, transcription and translation and entry number). Now, I want to load the first chinese word from the list, with the 3 keys “character 1”, “pinyin 1” and “translation 1”.

The tried-and-tested way of retrieving values from a dictionary is through my_dictionary[key]. However, if I were to insert the name of a variable in the part between brackets, python would read the name of this variable as the name of a key, and not use the value of the variable. Is there a way of doing the latter the right way? I have, for example, tried the following (obviously to no avail) to load key “character 1” from the list:

i = 1
character_to_load = "character %s" % str(i)
print quiz_list[character_to_load]

Any hints are extremely appreciated!

Answer 1

If I got you question right, I believe you might have some bug in the code, as this works fine:

>>> d =  {'translation 1': 'dilligent', 'pinyin 1': 'ren4wei2', 'character 1': '\xe8\xaa\x8d\xe7\x88\xb2'}
>>> key = "translation %s" % 1
>>> d[key]
'dilligent'

Does it help?