Cleaner idiom for text processing?

[Peter Hansen]

Michael Ellis wrote:

> I have some data files with lines in space-delimited <name> <value>
> format. There are multiple name-value pairs per line. 
> 
> Is there a cleaner idiom than the following for reading each line into
> an associative array for the purpose of accessing values by name?
> 
> for line in infile:
>    tokens = line.split()
>    dict = {}
>    for i in range(0, len(tokens),2) dict[tokens[i]] = tokens[i+1]
>    do_something_with_values(dict['foo'],dict['bar'])

for line in infile:
     tokens = line.split()
     d = dict(zip(tokens[::2], tokens[1::2]))
     do_something_with_values(...)

By the way, don't use "dict" as a variable name.  It's already
a builtin factory function to create dictionaries.

-Peter