Dealing with MULTIDIMENSIONAL dictionaries python

[Saidi Mwanundu]

Completely new to python and wondering how i can do this problem with multidimensiona l dictionaries. problem is to go in some file which has a counties information on a line with its state as well.
the objective is to prompt for a state and the program tells you which of the counties has the most (not necessary for me to explain) of one of the details. what i want to do is create a dictionary that takes as key the state and as value a dictionary(call ed state_dict). Then i want state dict to take county name as key and to take another dictionary as value(county_di ct). and then county_dict to take 4 keys of info and their values as their appropriate values.
what i have so far is

state=[]
usa_dict = {}
state_dict = {}
county_dict = {}
data = open("est10ALL.txt","rU")
for line in data:
  line=line.strip()
  line=line.split()
  state.append(line)
     if line[-3] not in usa_dict:
         usa_dict[line[-3]]= state_dict
         if line[-5] not in state_dict:
               state_dict[line[-5]] = county_dict

[bvdet]

It would be helpful if you would post 2 or 3 sample lines from your file.

Is this what you what your dictionary to look like?

{"Tennessee": {"Davidson": {'key1': value1, 'key2': value2, 'key3': value3, 'key4': value4}}}

[dwblas]

Generally, SQLite (comes with Python) works better than multi-dimensional dictionaries-->tutorial.

import sqlite3 as sqlite

class SQLiteTest():
    def __init__(self):
        # Create a connection to the (memory) database file
        self.con = sqlite.connect(':memory:')

        # Get a Cursor object that operates in the context of Connection con
        self.cur = self.con.cursor()
   
        self.cur.execute("CREATE TABLE test_it (state varchar, county varchar, data varchar)")

    ##----------------------------------------------------------------------
    def add_rec(self, state_in, county_in, add_var):
        self.cur.execute("insert into test_it values (?, ?, ?)", (state_in, county_in, add_var))
        self.con.commit()

    def lookup_county(self, county_in):
        ## lookup using a tuple
        result=self.cur.execute('SELECT * FROM test_it where county=?', (county_in,))
        recs_list=result.fetchall()
        print recs_list

    def lookup_data_and_county(self, county_in, data_in):
        ## lookup using a dictionary
        result=self.cur.execute('SELECT * FROM test_it where county=:dict_county and data=:dict_data', \
                                {"dict_county":county_in, "dict_data":data_in})
        recs_list=result.fetchall()
        print recs_list

if __name__=="__main__":
    ST=SQLiteTest()

    ## add some test records
    for ctr in range(5):
        ST.add_rec("Tennessee", "Davidson", "1")
    for ctr in range(3):
        ST.add_rec("Tennessee", "Daniels", "2")
    for ctr in range(3):
        ST.add_rec("Tennessee", "Davidson", "2")

    ## print all "Davidson"
    ST.lookup_county("Davidson")

    ## "Davidson" and "2"
    print "-"*50
    ST.lookup_data_and_county("Davidson", "2")