Iterate through a dictionary of lists one "line" at a time

[Arnaud Delobelle]

On Apr 18, 7:39 pm, wswilson <wswil... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here is my code:
>
> listing = {'id': ['a', 'b', 'c'], 'name': ['Joe', 'Jane', 'Bob']}
>
> I need to output:
>
> id name
> a Joe
> b Jane
> c Bob
>
> I could do:
>
> print 'id', 'name'
> for id, name in zip(listing['id'], listing['name']): print id, name
>
> but that only works if there are two entries in the dictionary, id and
> name, and I know what they are. My problem is I don't know how many of
> these entries there will be. Thanks for any help you can give!

You can use zip(*sequence_of_sequences)
eg zip(*[[1,2,3],[4,5,6]) returns [[1,4], [2,5], [3,6]]
(You can think of it as a transposition function)

For example:

keys, item_lists = zip(*listing.iteritems())
print " ".join(keys)
for items in zip(*item_lists):
    print " ".join(items)

would work.

HTH

--
Arnaud