Semi-Newbie needs a little help

[MRAB]

Chris Rebert wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 3:02 PM, Nile<nile_mcadams at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> I am trying to write a simple little program to do some elementary
>> stock market analysis.  I read lines, send each line to a function and
>> then the function returns a date which serves as a key to a
>> dictionary. Each time a date is returned I want to increment the value
>> associated with that date. The function seems to be working properly.
>> By means of a print statement I have inserted just before the return
>> value I can see there are three dates that are returned which is
>> correct.  The dictionary only seems to capture the last date. My test
>> data consists of five stocks, each stock with five days. The correct
>> answer would be a count of 5 for the second day, the third day, and
>> the last day -- 11/14/2008.
>>
>> Here is the a code, followed by a portion of the output.  I know
>> enough to write simple little programs like this with no problems up
>> until now but I don't know enough to figure out what I am doing
>> wrong.
> 
>>    for x in range(len(file_list)):
> 
> for filename in file_list:
> #I'm assuming the lack of indentation on the subsequent lines is a
> mere transcription error...
> 
>>    d = open(file_list[x] , "r")
> 
>     d = open(filename , "r")
> 
>>    data = d.readlines()
>>    k = above_or_below(data)                                # This
>> function seems to work correctly
>>    print "here is the value that was returned " , k
>>    dict[k] = dict.get(k,0) + 1
> 
> `dict` is the name of a builtin type. Please rename this variable to
> avoid shadowing the type.
> Also, where is this variable even initialized? It's not in this code
> snippet you gave.
> Further, I would recommend using a defaultdict
> (http://docs.python.org/dev/library/collections.html#collections.defaultdict)
> rather than a regular dictionary; this would make the
> count-incrementing part nicer.
> 
> Taking these changes into account, your code becomes:
> 
> from collections import defaultdict
> 
> counts = defaultdict(lambda: 0)
> 
Better is:

counts = defaultdict(int)

> for filename in file_list:
>     d = open(filename , "r")
>     data = d.readlines()
>     k = above_or_below(data) # This function seems to work correctly
>     print "here is the value that was returned " , k
>     counts[k] += 1
> 
>     values = counts.values()
>     print "here is a list of the dictionary values ", values
>     print "the length of the dictionary is ", len(counts)
> 
> 
> I don't immediately see what's causing your problem, but guess that it
> might've be related to the initialization of the `dict` variable.
> 
It might be that the indentation was wrong where the count is
incremented, but I can't tell because none of the lines were shown
indented.