python dictionary error AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'item'

Question

I am getting an unexpected error. I realize that there are posts with similar errors but either could not understand the answer or could not relate it to my case (dictionary).

I am trying to calculate a similarity score for each line of an input file and at every iteration (i.e for each line of input file) store the top 20 values of the score in a dictionary.

Following is my code:

result={}
//code for computation of score for each line of an input file

if (len(result)<20):
    result[str(line)]=score
else:
    if(len(result)==20):
        result = sorted(result.iteritems(), key=operator.itemgetter(1))
        if(result.item()[19].value()<score):
            result.item()[19][str(line)]=score

The error is:

File "retrieve.py", line 45, in <module>
if(result.item()[19].value()<score):
AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'item'

There is no item method of either dictionaries or lists.

David Robinson
– David Robinson

2013-06-30 17:56:23 +00:00
Commented Jun 30, 2013 at 17:56 — David Robinson
– David Robinson, Commented Jun 30, 2013 at 17:56

Elazar · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-22 18:17:20Z

3

result = sorted(result.iteritems(), key=operator.itemgetter(1))

result is not a dictionary anymore.

If I am not mistaken, your problem can be solved this way (assuming lines comes from somewhere):

result = sorted({(calculate_score(line), line) for line in lines})
print(result[:20])

Take a look at OrderedDict for making an ordered dictionary.

edited Jan 22, 2014 at 18:17

answered Jun 30, 2013 at 17:54

Elazar

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9 Comments

nish Over a year ago

How else could i sort the dictionary by value, so that i can perform the operaions i want

David Robinson Over a year ago

@naka: there is no way to sort a dictionary: dictionaries don't have an order.

Ashwini Chaudhary Over a year ago

@naka Pass the sorted list result to collections.OrderedDict.

Elazar Over a year ago

@naka what exactly were you trying to do?

nish Over a year ago

@Elazar : I have an input file, each line of which has a set of words. Next i take a query and compute similarity scores between each line of the input file and the query. I am trying to do this by using dictionary, keeping the maximum size of dictionary as 20(to get top 20 results, if sorted by value)

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