Create Dict within list of dict

Question

I'm trying to create a dict within a list of dicts. How do I build the data structure and later to fetch the data via jinja2? Here is an example:

var = {
    'site': '', 
    'listofiles': [
        {'time': '', 'name': ''}
    ]
}

exampledata = {
    'site': 'DC1', 
    'listofiles': [
        {'time': 'Thu Oct 3 22:26:40 2019', 'name': 'file1'}, 
        {'time': 'Thu Oct 3 20:26:40 2019', 'name': 'file2'}, 
        {'time': 'Thu Oct 3 21:26:40 2019', 'name': 'file3'}
    ]
} 

How to populate data within the var? I have tried doing the following, but it will only give me
{ 'DC1': [file1,file2,file3], 'DC2': [file1,file2] }

exampledata = {}
for f in os.listdir(path):
   exampledata.setdefault(f.split('.')[1],[]).append(f)

Answer 1

note! don't use 'path' name in your code for variable or anything as is the name of a builin module of python

use the following code. make_var function take 2 variables, the first variable is the site's name and the second variable is the directory's path which contains all the files you need to register for it. code is for Python3 only

from datetime import datetime as dt
from pathlib import Path


def make_var(site_name, pth): 
    exampledata = {'site':site_name, 'listofiles':[]}
    p = Path(pth)
    for f in p.iterdir():
        if f.is_file():
            name = f.name.replace(f.suffix, '')
            tm = dt.utcnow().strftime('%a %b %H:%M:%S %Y')
            exampledata['listofiles'].append({'time':tm, 'name':name}) 
    return exampledata

Answer 2

Not sure what do you mean by 'site'...

The code below uses site as location on the file system. It iterates over the sites list and read the files for each site.

import os
import datetime

data = dict()

sites = ['.']
for site in sites:
    data['listofiles'] = []
    data['site'] = site
    for f in os.listdir(site):
        data['listofiles'].append(
            {'time': str(datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(os.path.getmtime(os.path.join(site, f)))), 'name': f})