Python - Read file and save as Array

Question

I am new here and I have a question for the start. I need to do some exercises for my school and there we use now Python as language. Python is a new language for me. So my problem is:

We need to open a text-file with a list of prices for a supermarket, like this:

{"rice": 2.10,
"orange":3.31,
"eggs":1.92,
"cheese":8.10,
"chicken":5.22}

How can I open this file and convert it into a array or something else, that i can work with it? Furthermore I need this list as a hash array (named from PowerShell) to calculate in the next step with the products of the list.

Does this answer your question? [How to Open a file through python](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19508703/how-to-open-a-file-through-python) — baao, Dec 28 '19 at 12:31
Maybe you want [json](https://docs.python.org/3/library/json.html). — xiaoyu2006, Dec 28 '19 at 12:32
[Do some research before asking.](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/how-to-ask) — xiaoyu2006, Dec 28 '19 at 12:36

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 28 '19 at 12:34

It seems to me that the file you have is JSON format (I might be wrong). This can be very easily read into a dict.

I have created the file test.dat which contains the data. Then you simply do:

$ python3
Python 3.7.5 (default, Oct 22 2019, 10:35:10)
[Clang 10.0.1 (clang-1001.0.46.4)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import json
>>> with open("test.dat") as f:
...     data = json.loads(f.read())
...     print(data)
...     print(data["rice"])
...
# data is now a dict which is a key=>value container
# you can see it like:
{'rice': 2.1, 'orange': 3.31, 'eggs': 1.92, 'cheese': 8.1, 'chicken': 5.22}
# you can also access individual keys like data["rice"] in this case
2.1

You can read more about JSON here and about python dictionaries (ie hashmaps) here

Thank you very much for the post! The missing piece was json and it works fine. — ziBBer, Dec 29 '19 at 11:25

Python - Read file and save as Array

1 Answers1