CODEWITHSUNDEEP
python
Luke Kelly
Luke Kelly

Reputation: 443

Writing a file to a dictionary

I'm taking a CSC 110 project. I am trying use dictionaries for our assignment even though we haven't learned them yet.

I have a file of countries and how many medals they won separated by new line characters. EX:

Afghanistan
0
0
0
Albania
0
0
0
Algeria
0
2
0

Each line after the country is the medals they earned starting with gold and working its way down to bronze.

I want to take these and store them in a dictionary with the structure looking something like this. dict={Afghanistan: [0,0,0], Albania: [0,0,0]}

What I have :

olympic_stats = {}
fileIn = open('test.txt', 'r')

line = fileIn.readline()#Initialize Loop
counter = 0
while line != '':
    if counter == 4:
        counter = 0

    if counter%4 == 0:#First Pass, COUNTRY
        country_name = line.rstrip()
    elif counter%4 == 1:#Second Pass, GOLD
        gold_medals = int(line)
    elif counter%4 == 2:#Third Pass, SILVER
        silver_medals = int(line)
    else: #Fourth Pass, BRONZE
        bronze_medals = int(line)

    #update Counter
    counter += 1
    if counter == 4:
        olympic_stats[country_name] = [gold_medals, silver_medals, bronze_medals]


    line = fileIn.readline()#Update Loop

While this works it is nasty and over complicated. I'm trying to come up with a new way to do this.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 77

Answers (2)

aegon52
aegon52

Reputation: 128

While your answer isn't super concise its not 'bad' per say. I might do something like this:

olympic_stats = {}
while line:
    line_str = line.rstrip()
    if line_str[0].isalpha():
        country = line_str 
        olympic_stats[country] = []

    else:
        olympic_stats[country].append(line_str)

Upvotes: 1

Green Cloak Guy
Green Cloak Guy

Reputation: 24711

Your loop here is pretty clumsy - you can do better. You could, for example,

  • read the entire file at once into a list (using file.readlines())
  • count through the list four items at a time

which I have done here:

olympic_stats = {}
fileIn = open('test.txt', 'r')
fileLines = fileIn.readlines()
counter = 0
while counter < len(fileLines):
    country_name = fileLines[counter]
    gold_metals = fileLines[counter + 1]
    silver_metals = fileLines[counter + 2]
    bronze_metals = fileLines[counter + 3]

    olympic_stats[country_name] = [gold_medals, silver_medals, bronze_medals]
    counter += 4

There are more concise but much more complicated methods of doing this, by involving list comprehension and numpy or itertools, but those are more advanced topics and this should suffice for the time being.

While implementing this you might come up against errors when the number of lines in the file isn't easily divisible by four - I'll leave you to figure out how to fix that issue on your own, as it's a valuable learning experience and not too hard.

Upvotes: 1

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