I'm playing with some loops in python. I am quite familiar with using the "for" loop:
for x in y:
do something
You can also create a simple list using a loop:
i = []
for x in y:
i.append(x)
and then I recently discovered a nice efficient type of loop, here on Stack, to build a list (is there a name for this type of loop? I'd really like to know so I can search on it a little better):
[x.name for x in y]
Ok, that being said, I wanted to go further with the last type of loop and I tried to build a python dictionary using the same type of logic:
{x[row.SITE_NAME] = row.LOOKUP_TABLE for row in cursor}
instead of using:
x = {}
for row in cursor:
x[row.SITE_NAME] = row.LOOKUP_TABLE
I get an error message on the equal sign telling me it's an invalid syntax. I believe in this case, it's basically telling me that equal sign is a conditional clause (==), not a declaration of a variable.
My second question is, can I build a python dictionary using this type of loop or am I way off base? If so, how would I structure it?
The short form is as follows (called dict comprehension, as analogy to the list comprehension, set comprehension etc.):
x = { row.SITE_NAME : row.LOOKUP_TABLE for row in cursor }
so in general given some _container
with some kind of elements and a function _value
which for a given element returns the value that you want to add to this key in the dictionary:
{ _key : _value(_key) for _key in _container }