My Big Dict.

[Christian Tismer]

Paul Simmonds wrote:
...

I'm not trying to intrude this thread, but was just
struck by the list comprehension below, so this is
about readability.

> If this is a problem, use a combination of count and index methods to
> find the first, and use slices. For example, if you don't mind
> two-lined list comps:
> 
> d=dict([(l[:l.index('!')],l[l.index('!')+1:-1])\
>        for l in file('test.txt') if l.count('!')])

With every respect, this looks pretty much like another
P-language. The pure existance of list comprehensions
does not try to force you to use it everywhere :-)

...

compared to this:
...

> d={}
> for l in file("test.txt"):
>     try: i=l.index('!')
>     except ValueError: continue
>     d[l[:i]]=l[i+1:]

which is both faster in this case and easier to read.

About speed: I'm not sure with the current Python
version, but it might be worth trying to go without
the exception:

d={}
for l in file("test.txt"):
     i=l.find('!')
     if i >= 0:
         d[l[:i]]=l[i+1:]

and then you might even consider to split on the first
"!", but I didn't do any timings:

d={}
for l in file("test.txt"):
     try:
         key, value = l.split("!", 1)
     except ValueError: continue
     d[key] = value


cheers -- chris

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