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Newbie DATA STRUCTURES Question.

Huaiyu Zhu hzhu at localhost.localdomain
Mon Jul 31 00:01:52 EDT 2000 
On Sat, 29 Jul 2000 02:57:03 GMT, gbp <gpepice1 at nycap.rr.com> wrote:
>
>I have experience with Perl but non with Python.  
>
>I need to write a script to read a large text file into a structured
>format.
>
>In Perl one can create a list of records using something like pointers. 
>So really you have a list of pointers-- each one pointing to an
>anonymous record.  Each record is some data from a line in the file.
>

Others have given more general answers, but I think you might have this
specific question in mind: you have a file of form

11 12 13
21 22 23
...

and you want to get a list of dictionaries (ie an array of hashes in Perl)

result = [{'a':11, 'b':12, 'c':13},
          {'a':21, 'b':22, 'c':23},
	  ...
	  ]

You can do it as the following (not tested)

file = open(filename)  # or file = sys.stdin
names = ['a','b','c']
result = []
for line in file.readlines():
   fields = string.split(line)  # or use re to extract the fields
   record = {}
   for name, field in map(None, names, fields):
       record[name] = field
   result.append(record)

Hope this helps.

Huaiyu
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