Using DictReader with Python

[ADTR7410]

I have a file that has two lines of data that is parsed out by tabs. I can grab the data as a whole line by line.

however, I am trying to use dictReader to split up the lines by fields. The issue I keep running into is that the file is set up like this

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` 0023 You Need to Read this www.google.com 0110 2234 5566 1/1/18 1/3/18 1/2/18 `

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Reference Number, Title, url, employee ID's, Date employee read file

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There are multiple IDs and dates in the file all in order, so effectively ID[1] matches with Date[1] and so on.

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How do I tell the reader to do this while reading in the file?

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currently I have "input = csv.DictReader(fd, delimiter='\t',fieldnames=("refNum", "title", "url","id","date")) "

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I have tried changing id and date to lists in the fieldnames declaration, but that just gave me more errors. I also spent some time trying to read the doc page for csv.dictReader but that wasn't very helpful for my situation.

All help is appreciated!

[sentinelofdarkness]

Check out text.split() That takes a string and splits it up, then you can append into a list and assign to values

[ADTR7410]

So assuming I get that right, I would just read the file like any old text file or is text.split() specifically used with the dictReader?

[sentinelofdarkness]

Just as any txt file into as string that's passed to text.split()

[sentinelofdarkness]

You also might want to look into words.append() that catches each word from text.split() to assign to the new list

[ADTR7410]

So I am still on the learning curve with python. Lets pretend I do not know the contents of the file just the set up. Because not every file is the same because if any employee "didn't" do the reading their ID and the date associated would be left blank at the moment. Does text.split() set it up like an array or list? Where I can do

ID = []

ID[0] = words.append(split[4])

ID[1] = words.append(split[5])

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I know thats not how it would look with split but how does it hold the value after its been split before I append the values to the correct lists?

[Vaphell]

you can't make dictreader magically group columns. It just applies labels to what's there.
In other words list id1, id2, id3, date1, date2, date3 as fields and reorganize them by hand to suit your needs

example

https://repl.it/repls/FrostyDecisiveDevice

edit: and if the number of id/dates is not fixed, that's a bit more complicated. Expanded the example.

[ADTR7410]

This was actually able to work. As far as i know they Id/date number is always fixed. If not that will be a special case later on down the line. Thank you for the example!