I wrote the stupid little script below for practice; it takes a text
file with a list of surnames, and returns a dictionary where the keys
are first letters of the names, and the values are lists of names
grouped under their appropriate first-letter key, like so:
{'A': ['Abercrombie'], 'B': ['Barnaby', 'Black', 'Biggles'], 'D':
['Douglas', 'Dawn', 'Diggle'], 'G': ['Granger', 'Gossen']}
This is all well and good, but I want to sort the names in place, so
that the names in each list are alphabetical. I tried slapping a sort
() onto the dictionary list comprehension in every configuration I
could think of. I even replaced the one-line comprehension with a two-
step deal, like so:
for item in letters:
little_list = [name for name in names if name.startswith(item)]
phonebook[item] = little_list.sort()
That didn't work either, which I thought was very strange. Can anyone
help?
Another tangential question: why can't I do away with having a
separate names = [] list variable, and write the comprehension as:
for item in letters:
phonebook[item] = [line.strip('\n') for line in x if line.startswith
(item)]
Many thanks,
Eric
================
x = file('/path/to/file.txt', 'r')
letters = set()
names = []
phonebook = {}
for line in x:
y = line[0].upper()
letters.add(y)
names.append(line.strip('\n '))
for item in letters:
phonebook[item] = [name for name in names if name.startswith(item)]
print phonebook
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