Question

Suppose the following toyset (from a CSV file where column names are the “keys” and I’m only interested in some rows that I put in “data”):

keys = ['k1', 'k2', 'k3', 'k4']
data = [[1, 2, 3, 4], [5, 6, 7, 8], [9, 10, 11, 12], [13, 14, 15, 16]]

I want to get a dictionary with a list for each column, like this:

{'k1': [1, 5, 9, 13], 'k2': [2, 6, 10, 14], 'k3': [3, 7, 11, 15], 'k4': [4, 8, 
12, 16]}

In my code I first initialize the dictionary with empty lists and then iterate (in the order of the keys) to append each item in their list.

my_dict = dict.fromkeys(keys, [])
for row in data:
    for i, k in zip(row, keys):
        my_dict[k].append(i)

But it doesn’t work. It builds this dictionary:

{'k3': [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16], 'k2': [1, 2, 3,
4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16], 'k1': [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 
9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16], 'k4': [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 
13, 14, 15, 16]}

You can see that all the elements are in all lists instead of just four elements in each list. If I print i, k in the loop it does the correct pairs of items and keys. So I guess the problem is when I add item i in the list for key k.

Does anyone know why all elements are added to all lists and what would be the right way of building my dictionary?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

zip it but transpose it first:

>>> keys = ['k1', 'k2', 'k3', 'k4']
>>> data = [[1, 2, 3, 4], [5, 6, 7, 8], [9, 10, 11, 12], [13, 14, 15, 16]]
>>> print dict(zip(keys, zip(*data)))
{'k3': (3, 7, 11, 15), 'k2': (2, 6, 10, 14), 'k1': (1, 5, 9, 13), 'k4': (4, 8, 12, 16)}

If you want lists not tuples in the array:

>>> print dict(zip(keys, [list(i) for i in zip(*data)]))

And if you want to use your version, just make dictionary comprehension, not fromkeys:

my_dict = { k : [] for k in keys }

The problem in your case that you initialize my_dict with the same value:

>>> my_dict = dict.fromkeys(keys, [])
>>> my_dict
{'k3': [], 'k2': [], 'k1': [], 'k4': []}
>>> my_dict['k3'].append(1)
>>> my_dict
{'k3': [1], 'k2': [1], 'k1': [1], 'k4': [1]}

When you do it right (with dictionary/list comprehension):

>>> my_dict = dict((k, []) for k in keys )
>>> my_dict
{'k3': [], 'k2': [], 'k1': [], 'k4': []}
>>> my_dict['k3'].append(1)
>>> my_dict
{'k3': [1], 'k2': [], 'k1': [], 'k4': []}