How to make the text file have the same number of whitespaces in order to make it into a dictionary-CodePudding

So I figured out how to make my text file into a dictionary but there is problem that is occurring. This is an example text file:

pig: animal

dog: animal

cat:animal

car: thing

When I convert this into a dictionary I get: {" animal": ['pig','dog'], "animal" : ["cat"], " thing" : ['car']}

I need the cat to go with the pig and dog: {" animal": ["pig', 'dog', 'cat']} but since there is no space after the colon in the text file my program is not recognizing the key is still the same.

Thank you, any help is needed!

CodePudding user response：

You can remove all space after ':'. So, every value will have no space after column(:). For example:

   with open('test.txt', mode='r') as file:
       text = file.read()
   clean_text = re.sub(r':( ) ', ':', text)
  
   with open('output.txt', 'w') as file_out:
       file_out.write(clean_text)

so for Input:

   pig: animal

dog:     animal

cat:animal

car: thing

Output:

   pig:animal

dog:animal

cat:animal

car:thing

CodePudding user response：

You could process the file and fix the colon space problem:

file = open('your_text.txt', mode='r')
text = file.read()
text = re.sub(r':(\w)', r': \1', text)
file.close()

with open('your_text.txt', 'w') as file_out:
    file_out.write(text)

CodePudding user response：

You may also try this by using the strip method if you do not wish to create a new output file.

a = {}

with open("text.txt") as file:
    for line in file.readlines():
        text = line.partition(":")
        value, key = text[0].strip(), text[2].strip()
        a.setdefault(key, [])
        a[key]  = [value]

print(a)

CodePudding user response：

One of the appraches:

from collections import defaultdict
data = ['pig: animal', 'dog: animal', 'cat:animal', 'car: thing']
out = defaultdict(list)
for entry in data:
    entry_data = entry.split(':')
    out[entry_data[1].strip()].append(entry_data[0].strip())

print (out)

Output:

defaultdict(<class 'list'>, {'animal': ['pig', 'dog', 'cat'], 'thing': ['car']})