Where is the syntax for the dict() constructor ?!

[Captain Poutine]

Neil Cerutti wrote:
> On 2007-07-05, Captain Poutine <captainpoutine at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm simply trying to read a CSV into a dictionary.
>>
>> (if it matters, it's ZIP codes and time zones, i.e.,
>> 35983,CT
>> 39161,CT
>> 47240,EST
>>
>>
>>
>> Apparently the way to do this is:
>>
>> import csv
>>
>> dictZipZones = {}
>>
>> reader = csv.reader(open("some.csv", "rb"))
>> for row in reader:
>>      # Add the row to the dictionary
> 
> In addition to Chris's answer, the csv module can read and write
> dictionaries directly. Look up csv.DictReader and csv.DictWriter.
> 

Yes, thanks.  I was happy when I saw it at 
http://www.python.org/doc/2.4/lib/node615.html


"Reader objects (DictReader instances and objects returned by the 
reader() function) have the following public methods:

next( 	)
     Return the next row of the reader's iterable object as a list, 
parsed according to the current dialect."

But that's not enough information for me to use.  Also, the doc says 
basically "csv has dialects," but doesn't even enumerate them.  Where is 
the real documentation?


Also, when I do a print of row, it comes out as:
['12345', 'ET']

But there are no quotes around the number in the file.  Why is Python 
making it a string?