Thanks, John. >What are you trying that isn't working? Typical newbie trick - trying to make things more complicated than they are. I didn't realize that syntax would establish the key/value pairs of the dictionary - I thought that would only allow you to establish the value to correspond to a specified (and pre-exiting) key, not establish the key as well.
I was establishing the dictionary then trying to use dict.update() to append key/value pairs. Thanks - now, given my query that returns the table structure, this works fine: table_dict = {} table_specs = cursor.execute(query_string) for row in table_specs: row_dict = {} row_dict['type'] = row.DataType row_dict['size'] = row.Length table_dict[row.name] = row_dict table_dict['path']['type'] #-> 'nvarchar' table_dict['path']['size'] # -> 200 table_dict['Artist']['size'] #-> 50 Is this (nesting dictionaries) a good way to store multiple attributes associated with a single key value? On Mon, 14 May 2012 17:05:17 +0000 (UTC), John Gordon <gor...@panix.com> wrote: >In <bca2r7dt23l49ovp7m7id1ap3iaccvk...@4ax.com> Steve Sawyer ><ssaw...@stephensawyer.com> writes: > >> What I think I want to do is to construct a dictionary using the >> column names as the index value, and a list containing the various >> attributes (data type, lenghth, precision). > >If you're using just the column name as the dictionary key, make sure >there are no duplicate column names among all your tables. > >> If this is a good approach, I ran into a problem populating the >> dictionary as I couldn't seem to figure out how to make the update() >> method work by passing the name property of the row object; I kept >> getting a "keyword can't be an expression" error. > >The general syntax for assigning to a dictionary is: > > my_dictionary[key] = value > >What are you trying that isn't working? --Steve-- -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list