Question

I’ve got a dictionary:

mydict = {key1: value_a, key2: value_b, key3: value_c}

I want to write the data to a file dict.csv, in this style:

key1: value_a
key2: value_b
key3: value_c

I wrote:

import csv
f = open('dict.csv','wb')
w = csv.DictWriter(f,mydict.keys())
w.writerow(mydict)
f.close()

But now I have all keys in one row and all values in the next row..

When I manage to write a file like this, I also want to read it back to a new dictionary.

Just to explain my code, the dictionary contains values and bools from textctrls and checkboxes (using wxpython). I want to add “Save settings” and “Load settings” buttons.
Save settings should write the dictionary to the file in the mentioned way (to make it easier for the user to edit the csv file directly), load settings should read from the file and update the textctrls and checkboxes.

Answer 1

The DictWriter doesn’t work the way you expect.

with open('dict.csv', 'w') as csv_file:  
    writer = csv.writer(csv_file)
    for key, value in mydict.items():
       writer.writerow([key, value])

To read it back:

with open('dict.csv') as csv_file:
    reader = csv.reader(csv_file)
    mydict = dict(reader)

which is quite compact, but it assumes you don’t need to do any type conversion when reading