Question

In my project, I’m trying to go through a file that has many strings and split them. There are multiple lines. I want each portion of the split string to go into a dict, but I’m not sure if that’s possible. Right now I have:

while inFile:
    key, value = inFile.readline().lower().rstrip().rsplit(' ', 1)

I thought about using dict and zip, but I think that’s if you have lists..

My input file looks like this. The ‘$’ are end lines. I’d like for example, ‘A B’ to be the key, and ’10’ to be the value.

A B 10 $
A C 4$
B D 29$
B E 1 $

Answer 1

You should be able to do something like the following:

data = dict(line.lower().rstrip().rsplit(' ', 1) for line in inFile)

This works because dict() can accept an iterable of key/value pairs, and as long as each line in your file contains at least one space, line.lower().rstrip().rsplit(' ', 1) will result in a two-element tuple.

Note that iterating over a file object will give you each line in the file, so for line in inFile: is preferred over while inFile: line = inFile.readline().