Question

#!/usr/bin/python -tt

# A dictionary Of Each New SSID
WirelessNetwork = {}
WirelessNetwork['name'] = 'baz'
WirelessNetwork['type'] = 'bar'
WirelessNetwork['pass'] = 'foo'

# A list of all SSIDs
networkAddList = (WirelessNetwork)

def addWireless(passedDict={}):
  print 'Adding SSID: %s' % passedDict['name']
  print 'Of type: %s' % passedDict['type']
  print 'With Password: %s' % passedDict['pass']

for networkDict in networkAddList:
  addWireless(networkDict)

So I have a List “networkAddList” full of dictionaries ,i.e. “WirelessNetwork”.
I want to iterate that list “for networkDict in networkAddList”
and pass the dictionary itself to my function “addWireless”

When I run the sample code above I get the following error:

TypeError: 'string indices must be integers, not str'

Which makes me think that python thinks passedDict is a string, thus thinking I want string indices i.e. 0 or something rather then the key ‘name’. I’m new to python but I am going to have to do this kind of thing a lot so I hope somebody can point me in the right direction as I think its pretty simple. But I can’t change the basic idea , i.e. a list of dictionaries.

Answer 1

When debugging in python you can confirm your suspicion that the value being passed is a string with the type function:

print type(passedDict)

When you create your tuple with one element, you need a trailing “,”. Also note that a tuple is different from a list in python. The primary difference is that tuples are immutable and lists are not.

#!/usr/bin/python -tt

# A dictionary Of Each New SSID
WirelessNetwork = {}
WirelessNetwork['name'] = 'baz'
WirelessNetwork['type'] = 'bar'
WirelessNetwork['pass'] = 'foo'

# A list of all SSIDs
networkAddList = (WirelessNetwork,)

def addWireless(passedDict={}):
  print 'Adding SSID: %s' % passedDict['name']
  print 'Of type: %s' % passedDict['type']
  print 'With Password: %s' % passedDict['pass']

for networkDict in networkAddList:
  addWireless(networkDict)