Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="Bruno Desthuilliers, post: 3005745"] special_dragonfly a écrit : May I suggest a couple possible improvements ? First : you're of course free to use any naming convention you like, and it's obviously better to stay consistent, but the canonical Python convention is to use all_lower for vars, functions (and methods) and modules, and MixedCase for classes. About the code now: def EnterDictionary(FieldsDictionary,key,data): for i in range(0,int(data[6:])): 1/ Golden rule : avoid the use of "magic numbers". This one stands true for any languages !-). The usual solution is to use symbolic constants. While Python doesn't have real symbolic constant, the convention is to write them ALL_UPPER. 2/ range() can be used with only one argument, which then will be use as the upper bound. IOW, range(0, X) is the same as range(X) line=myfile.readline() 3/ where does this 'myfile' comes from ? (hint : don't use globals when you can avoid them) line=line.strip() line=line[6:-1] 4/ magic numbers again, cf /1. Question : does this 6 has anything to do with the other one ? What will happen when the file format will change ? 5/ you can do all this in a single line, adding the split() too: args = myfile.readline().strip()[XXX:-1].split(",") If you expect key to most of the times be already in FieldsDictionnary, then a try/except block might be a bit faster. If you expect key to not be here most of the times, then your solution is right. Note that you can also use dict.setdefault(key, default): # probably bad names but I don't have a clue what they should be DATA_INDEX_OFFSET = 6 LINE_START = 6 LINE_END = -1 def update_fields_dict(fields_dict, key, data, datafile): for i in range(int(data[DATA_INDEX_OFFSET:])): args =datafile.readline().strip()[LINE_START:LINE_END].split(",") fields_dict.setdefault(key, []).append(FieldClass(*args)) Feel free to take or leave what you consider appropriate here. But by all means avoid magic numbers, except possibly for Q&D throw-away scripts (and even then...). HTH That's usually what happens then, don't worry. [/QUOTE]

Verification