writing to lists within a dictionary

cokofreedom at gmail.com cokofreedom at gmail.com
Thu Sep 20 14:37:05 CEST 2007

I am trying to write a basic anagram system, that takes a text file
line by line and by sorting the string into its alphabetical form
compares it to keys within a dictionary.

If it matches a key I want to add it (in its unordered form) to a list
for that key.

So far this is what I have

import sys, string, fileinput

# takes an item (string) and converts it to its basic alphabetical
def getChar( item ):
	item_chars = []
	for i in range(len(item)):
	return string.join(item_chars, "")

anagramDict = {}

for line in fileinput.input("fakelist.txt"):
	myLine = line.replace("\n", "") #remove the carriage returns
	myString = getChar(myLine) #get the alphabetical form
	for k in anagramDict.items(): #iterator through the keys in the
		if k[0] == myString: #if the key matches our string
			anagramDict[k].append([myLine])#append that k and add the value
this line
		anagramDict[myString] = [myLine] #else there is no key the same so
make a new one

print anagramDict

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