How to create a list of dictionaries?

[shigehiro]

Hi,

I am quite new to Python & recently I have been given an assignment to create a list of dictionaries.
Can anyone give me an idea of how to do so?

Let say, my dictionary will have 3 keys: "FirstName" , "LastName" , and "SSID".

So the expected output would be:
dictList = [ {'FirstName': 'Michael', 'LastName': 'Kirk', 'SSID': '224567'},
{'FirstName': 'Linda', 'LastName': 'Matthew', 'SSID': '123456'},
{'FirstName': 'Sandra', 'LastName': 'Parkin', 'SSID': '123456'},
{'FirstName': 'Bob', 'LastName': 'Henry', 'SSID': '666666'},
{'FirstName': 'Silvia', 'LastName': 'Perkin', 'SSID': '676767'}]

And assuming after having the above list, how can I retrieve the info of each dictionary entry?

Thanks in advance

Leny

[jlm699]

One way is to simply use the append() function of a list.

[CODE=python]
>>> lst = []
>>> lst.append({'fn ':'b','ln':'d'} )
>>> lst.append({'fn ':'a', 'ln':'c'})
>>> print lst
[{'fn':'b', 'ln':'d'}, {'fn':'a', 'ln':'c'}]
>>> for elem in lst:
print elem['fn'], elem['ln']
b d
a c
[/CODE]

[bvdet]

Also using the list append method similar to jlm699's post, you can do something like this:
[code=Python]
keys = ['FirstName', 'LastName', 'SSID']

name1 = ['Michael', 'Kirk', '224567']
name2 = ['Linda', 'Matthew', '123456']

dictList = []
dictList.append (dict(zip(keys, name1)))
dictList.append (dict(zip(keys, name2)))

print dictList
for item in dictList:
print ' '.join([item[key] for key in keys])[/code]

Printed output:

>>> [{'LastName': 'Kirk', 'SSID': '224567', 'FirstName': 'Michael'}, {'LastName': 'Matthew', 'SSID': '123456', 'FirstName': 'Linda'}]
Michael Kirk 224567
Linda Matthew 123456
>>>

[jlm699]

[code=Python]
dictList.append (dict(zip(keys, name1)))
[/code]

That is awesome... I never knew about zip() ... that is going to help my dictionary implementations immensely!

[shigehiro]

Cool! Thank you so much for the replies!

I ll try it out, shall post again if I have any further doubt.

Shige