Thank you all so much for the generous dollop of help: the dictionary suggestion is particularly helpful. The problem arises as follows: A software application stores the securities held in a portfolio in a .csv file, one row per security, with three colulmns.
The first has a security identifier or descriptor (such as a ticker) the second has a single letter that identifies the type of the identifier (T for ticker, C for cusip etc.) and the third has the number of shares. A typical line looks like this: IBM, T, 500 I need to read in one or more portfolios and aggregate their holdings. To do so, I read in the portfolios using the csv package, convert each line to a list and then append it to a list of lists. Eventually the list of lists contains all the securities, and can then be sorted and aggregated. I suppose I could convert it instead to a dictionary, and the most natural key would be the first two items, i.e. a portfolio containing just 500 shares of IBM ought to be represented as {("IBM", "T") : 500 } How can I translate the data I read in using csv.reader into a dictionary? Thomas Philips -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list