[Tutor] Dictionary Keys

[alan.gauld@bt.com]

> Basically, what do y'all tend to do when you are 
> entering/saving information in a dictionary and, 
> the way you've set up your script's parameters, 
> you could conceivably create key:value combinations 
> with identical keys (but different values)? 

Dictionary keys are unique so you can't do it!
What you can do is have the value store a list of 
items(or even another dictionary). Thus if we have 
patient ID as the first key and the value is a 
dictionary of visits keyed by date/time we can
generate something like this:

dict = {'Gauld': {20020806:(15,'sore head','$50'),
           20020601:(22,'pain in the neck', '$500')},
        'Colburn': { 20010102: 47, 'stabbing pain', $5) } }

Thus we could get a list of visit dates for gauld by:

dict['gauld'].keys()

or a particular visits details with:

dict['gauld'][20020806]

or a particular item:

print "Complaint: ", dict['gauld'].[20020806][1]

Does that help?

BTW anything morre complex that this and I'd definitely 
suggest moving to a real database. I'd even consider it 
for this level if there will be many(>1000) patients/visits.

Alan g.
Author of the 'Learning to Program' web site
http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld