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I'm really new into Python and I have a question. I need to convert a file containing morse code alphabet. It's a file with a single string and it looks like this (A2.-B4-...C4-.-.D3-..). I'm thinking that I should be able to create a dictionary out of this file but I'm not sure how. Do you guys have any idea?

This approach uses regular expression to parse your entire string and convert it to dict directly:

import re



with open('yourfile.txt') as f:

    data = f.read()



morse = dict(re.findall(r'(w)d+([-.]+)', data))

print(morse)

The results for your example data:

{'A': '.-', 'C': '-.-.', 'B': '-...', 'D': '-..'}

Here's a short explanation of the regular expression:

• 
  (w) parens means we want to capture this part, w means any alphanumeric
  


• 
  d+ here, d means any digit and the + sign means one or more
  


• 
  ([-.]+) parens again means we want to capture this part, [-.] means we want . or - and the + again means we want one or more of those.

For more regular expression explanation I suggest reading "Regular Expression HOWTO" by A. M. Kuchling, excellent read.

When you open files in Python, they can be read line by line like so:

d = {} # Init empty dict

with open("file.txt", "r") as file: # This manages the open/close, IO mode, et cetera

    for line in file: # Iterates through the file line by line

        # Now the variable line represents a string for that line

        sline = line.split("-")

        d[sline[0]] = sline[1]

In the last two lines of this example I assume that you want a dict where the key (lookup) always sits before "-" on each line, and the value (to be looked up) is always after. On this assumption I line.split("-") and then assign those keys and values to dict d with d[sline[0]] = sline[1]. If you adopt this solution but have problems with this part of the solution, I think that might warrant a separate question.