How to read from a file into a dict with string key and tuple value?

Question

For an assignment, I'm creating a program that retrieves from a file information regarding Olympic countries and their medal count.

One of my functions goes through a list in this format:

Country,Games,Gold,Silver,Bronze
AFG,13,0,0,2
ALG,15,5,2,8
ARG,40,18,24,28
ARM,10,1,2,9
ANZ,2,3,4,5

The function needs to go through this list, and store into a dictionary with the country name as a key, and the remaining four entries as a tuple.

Here is what I am working with so far:

def medals(string):
    '''takes a file, and gathers up the country codes and their medal counts
    storing them into a dictionary'''

    #creates an empty dictionary
    medalDict = {}
    #creates an empty tuple
    medalCount = ()
    #These following two lines remove the column headings
    with open(string) as fin:
        next(fin)

        for eachline in fin:
            code, medal_count = eachline.strip().split(',',1)
            medalDict[code] = medal_count

    return medalDict

Now, the intent is for the entries to look something like this

{'AFG': (13, 0, 0, 2)}

Instead, I'm getting

{'AFG': '13,0,0,2'}

It looks like it is being stored as a string, and not a tuple. Is it something to do with the

medalDict[code] = medal_count

line of code? I'm not too sure how to convert that into separate integer values for a tuple neatly.

Answer 1

You are storing the whole string '13,0,0,2' as value, so

medalDict[code] = medal_count

should be replaced by:

medalDict[code] = tuple(medal_count.split(','))

Your original thought is correct, with this line being the sole exception. What is changed is now it splits the '13,0,0,2' into a list ['13', '0', '0', '2'] and converts it into a tuple.

You can also do this to convert strings inside into integers:

medalDict[code] = tuple([int(ele) for ele in medal_count.split(',')])

But make sure your medal_count contains only integers.

Answer 2

This line:

code, medal_count = eachline.strip().split(',',1)

... is splitting the whitespace-stripped eachline, 1 time, on ',', then storing the resulting two strings into code and medal_count ... so yes, medal_count contains a string.

You could handle this one of two ways:

1. Add a line along the lines of:

   split_counts = tuple(medal_count.split(','))
   

   ... and then use split_counts from there on in the code, or

2. (in Python 3) Change the line above to

   code, *medal_count = eachline.strip().split(',')
   

   ... which makes use of Extended iterable unpacking (and will give you a list, so if a tuple is necessary it'll need to be converted).

Answer 3

Your Problem seems to be this:

split(',',1)
# should be
split(',')

because split(..., 1) only makes 1 split and split(...) splits as much as possible.

So you should be able to do this:

    for eachline in fin:
        code, *medal_count = eachline.strip().split(',')
        medalDict[code] = medal_count