Python: regex to make a python dictionary out of a sequence of words?

Question

I have a .txt file with the following contents:

norway  sweden
bhargama  bhargama
forbisganj  forbesganj
canada  usa
ankara  turkey

I want to overwrite the file such that these are its new contents:

'norway' : 'sweden',
'bhargama': 'bhargama',
'forbisganj' : 'forbesganj',
'canada':  'usa',
'ankara':  'turkey'

Basically I want to turn the .txt file into a python dictionary so I can manipulate it. Are there built in libraries for this sort of task?

Here is my attempt:

import re
target = open('file.txt', 'w')

for line in target:
  target.write(re.sub(r'([a-z]+)', r'':'"\1"','', line))

I'm succeeding in getting the quotes; but what's the proper regex to do what I described above?

Answer 1

You don't need a regular expression for that.

File:

norway  sweden
bhargama  bhargama
forbisganj  forbesganj
canada  usa
ankara  turkey

Code:

with open('myfile.txt') as f:
    my_dictionary = dict(line.split() for line in f)

This goes through each line in your file and splits it on whitespace into a list. This generator of lists is fed to dict(), which makes each one a dictionary key and value.

>>> my_dictionary['norway']
'sweden'