Python: regex to make a python dictionary out of a sequence of words?

Question

I have a .txt file with the following contents:

norway  sweden
bhargama  bhargama
forbisganj  forbesganj
canada  usa
ankara  turkey

I want to overwrite the file such that these are its new contents:

'norway' : 'sweden',
'bhargama': 'bhargama',
'forbisganj' : 'forbesganj',
'canada':  'usa',
'ankara':  'turkey'

Basically I want to turn the .txt file into a python dictionary so I can manipulate it. Are there built in libraries for this sort of task?

Here is my attempt:

import re
target = open('file.txt', 'w')

for line in target:
  target.write(re.sub(r'([a-z]+)', r'':'"\1"','', line))

I'm succeeding in getting the quotes; but what's the proper regex to do what I described above?

why do you want to use regex here there is no need of regex here — The6thSense
– The6thSense, Commented Oct 19, 2015 at 5:18
First thing that came to mind... Is there a more efficient way to do it? — ifma
– ifma, Commented Oct 19, 2015 at 5:19

TigerhawkT3 · Accepted Answer · 2015-10-26 11:18:34Z

10

You don't need a regular expression for that.

File:

norway  sweden
bhargama  bhargama
forbisganj  forbesganj
canada  usa
ankara  turkey

Code:

with open('myfile.txt') as f:
    my_dictionary = dict(line.split() for line in f)

This goes through each line in your file and splits it on whitespace into a list. This generator of lists is fed to dict(), which makes each one a dictionary key and value.

>>> my_dictionary['norway']
'sweden'

edited Oct 26, 2015 at 11:18

answered Oct 19, 2015 at 5:26

TigerhawkT3

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3 Comments

ifma Over a year ago

Thanks for the help :)

TigerhawkT3 Over a year ago

If you don't use strip(), the value will have '\n' at the end, and I didn't want that.

TigerhawkT3 Over a year ago

I tested it (more than once) and found that it did need the strip(). However, I tested it yet again just now and it isn't producing the result I got before. I don't know why the result is different now, but I'll remove it.

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