Question

I am reposting this because I think Open Study messed up the replies to my previous post.

I am trying to figure out a simple way to take lines from a text document and turning them into keys in a dictionary (values don't matter, can be arbitrary).

I was thinking something like:

wordList = open('word.txt', 'r', -1)
wordDict = {}

for line in wordList:
wordDict[line] = 0

but wordDict[line] looks for a integer index value right? What am I missing? I know it is a simple little syntax error. I have been looking on google, but haven't found a situation as simple as this.

Answer 1

jesse.bo, your code worked fine for me. I have a word.txt file containing:

test1
test2 and test3

I run your code and then print wordDict and get:

{'test2 and test3': 0, 'test1\n': 0}

Voila! A dictionary comprised of keys for every line in word.txt and an arbitrary value 0 for each.

Answer 2

if you don't mind have the newline character included in the key:
word_dict = dict.fromkeys(wordlist.readlines(), None)
http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#dict.fromkeys
http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#file.readlines

Answer 3

or if you don't want the newline character:
words_dict = dict.fromkeys(wordlist.read().splitlines(), None)