Populate dictionary from list

Question

I have a list of strings (from a .tt file) that looks like this:

list1 = ['have\tVERB', 'and\tCONJ', ..., 'tree\tNOUN', 'go\tVERB']

I want to turn it into a dictionary that looks like:

dict1 = { 'have':'VERB', 'and':'CONJ', 'tree':'NOUN', 'go':'VERB' }

I was thinking of substitution, but it doesn't work that well. Is there a way to tag the tab string '\t' as a divider?

Answer 1

Try the following:

dict1 = dict(item.split('\t') for item in list1)

Output:

>>>dict1
{'and': 'CONJ', 'go': 'VERB', 'tree': 'NOUN', 'have': 'VERB'}

Answer 2

Since str.split also splits on '\t' by default ('\t' is considered white space), you could get a functional approach by feeding dict with a map that looks quite elegant:

d = dict(map(str.split, list1))

With the dictionary d now being in the wanted form:

print(d)
{'and': 'CONJ', 'go': 'VERB', 'have': 'VERB', 'tree': 'NOUN'}

---

If you need a split only on '\t' (while ignoring ' ' and '\n') and still want to use the map approach, you can create a partial object with functools.partial that only uses '\t' as the separator:

from functools import partial 

# only splits on '\t' ignoring new-lines, white space e.t.c 
tabsplit = partial(str.split, sep='\t')
d = dict(map(tabsplit, list1)) 

this, of course, yields the same result for d using the sample list of strings.