[Tutor] Tree Ctrl Data Structure - Help, please!

[John Fouhy]

On 17/07/2008, lauren at protopc.com <lauren at protopc.com> wrote:
>  Okay so i have a list of lists just as you describe below...I hate to make
>  myself look really stupid...but I don't see how this converts to a tree
>  structure...I was looking at this earlier and I guess what's confusing me
>  are the duplicates...do I need to convert the list below into a data
>  structure of tuples? Can this be plugged straight into a tree control?

Ahh, you will have to write a function.  Once you have the data as a
list of tuples, all the information is there, but there is a lot of
redundancy.

You may find it easier to represent your tree as nested dictionaries;
the disadvantage of dictionaries is that they are unordered, but this
may not matter to you.  Here's something for you to try: forget about
states for a moment, just make yourself a list of continents and
countries:

country_tuples = [('north america', 'united states'), ('north
america', 'canada'), ('asia', 'japan'), ('asia', 'china'), ('africa',
'zimbabwe')]  # etc

See if you can convert that to a dictionary like this:

world_dict = { 'north america':['united states', 'canada'],
'asia':['japan', 'china'], 'africa':['zimbabwe'] }

Your function should start like this:

def tupes_to_dict(country_tuples):
    world_dict = {}
    for continent, country in country_tuples:
    # etc
    return world_dict

If you can do that, have a go at applying the same idea to the full
data structure.

-- 
John.