populating values of a dictionary with lists in python csv package

Question

I have a CSV file of sat scores per state. The file has one state's data(state_name, rate, math, verbal) per one row of the CSV. I have created a dictionary with key values of state, rate, math, verbal with the code below:

with open('../sat_scores.csv', mode='r') as f:
    sat = {}
    reader = csv.reader(f)
    for row in reader:
        for item in row:
            sat[item]=[]
        break

now I to fill the columns with the remaining CSV. The dictionary format for data will be the column names as the key, and the data under each column as the values. I also need to make string numeric columns Rate, Math, and Verbal into floats. I have gotten this far:

    for row in reader:
        for item, key in (row, sat.keys()):
            if key == 'State':
                sat[key].append(item)
                print(sat)
            else:
                new_item = float(item)
                sat[key].append(new_item)
                print(sat)

I cannot figure out how to loop through both the keys of sat dictionary and the items in row simultaneously. Help, please?

Answer 1

You need to keep the order of the header fields:

reader = csv.reader(f)
header = next(reader)
for row in reader:
    for name, value in zip(header, row):
        print(name, value)

You don't really need to do that yourself though, you can use csv.DictReader to get a dictionary per row, with keys taken from the first line:

reader = csv.DictReader(f)
for row in reader:
    print(row)