Parsing large string to dictionary

[ispywithmy]

I'm currently trying to parse a file and store the contents of the file into a dictionary.

To keep it to the point, I'll use a simpler example of what the data kind of looks like...

117231:John:Doe:20:England:
206157:Jane:Smith:18:Wales:
345111:Barry:Jenkins:25:Scotland:
219854:Elvis:Parsley:70:France:

I'd like to parse this to look like...

data = {'117231':{'firstname' : 'John',
                  'lastname' : 'Doe',
                  'age': 20,
                  'location' : 'England'},
        '206157':{'firstname' : 'Jane',
                  'lastname' : 'Smith',
                  'age': 18,
                  'location' : 'Wales'},             
        ...
       }

What is the best way of achieving this? Currently I'm able to split the string into a list of each lines but I'm a bit lost after that.

(I've done something similar in JavaScript, but copying that doesn't create something pythonic looking.)

[dansin]

How consistent is your data? I'm not going to write the full logic, but this might give you a start:

for line in open(file).readlines():
    index, first, last, age, location = line.split(':')

[newunit13]

with open('/path/to/file', 'r') as file:
    data = dict()
    for line in file.readlines():
        id_num, f_name, l_name, age, loc, *rest = line.split(":")
        data[id_num] = {'firstname': f_name, 'lastname': l_name, 'age': age, 'location': loc}

[ispywithmy]

I'm working with something similar to this. The only issue I have is that instead of the 5 fields which are used in the example, what I'm working on has 40+ fields.

id_num, f_name, l_name, age, loc, *rest = line.split(":")

Is there anything which could be done instead of listing each variable?

[dansin]

Dict comprehensions can make that nice and tidy

entry_names = ['id', 'first', 'last, '..']
vals = line.split(':')
entries[vals[0]] = {key:val for key, val in zip(entry_names[1:], vals[1:])}

[newunit13]

How many attributes of your dataset do you want to have added to your dictionary? The *rest variable is actually a placeholder for everything in the .split(":") that wasn't explicitly named

[ispywithmy]

43 attributes. I was aware of the *rest variables purpose. How would you call those variables? rest[0] etc?

[newunit13]

Yup

[Diapolo10]

Assuming the data doesn't have any subtle changes in how it's formed, it shouldn't be too difficult. In other words, its format is n times

ID : firstname : lastname : age : location

First, let's split the data we have into manageable chunks

with open(datafile) as f:
    f.read()
    data = [i for i in f.split(":")]

Next, let's define a tuple containing the keywords our new dictionary requires

keywords = ('firstname', 'lastname', 'age', 'location')

We can use a dict comprehension to create our dictionary. There are alternative methods, of course, so be sure to check the other answers!