[FIXED] How to append all data to dict instead of last result only?

Issue

I'm trying to create a metadata scraper to enrich my e-book collection, but am experiencing some problems. I want to create a dict (or whatever gets the job done) to store the index (only while testing), the path and the series name. This is the code I've written so far:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup 
def get_opf_path():
    
    opffile=variables.items
    pathdict={'index':[],'path':[],'series':[]}
    safe=[]
    x=0
    for f in opffile:
        x+=1
        pathdict['path']=f
        pathdict['index']=x
        with open(f, 'r') as fi:
            soup=BeautifulSoup(fi, 'lxml')
            for meta in soup.find_all('meta'):
                if meta.get('name')=='calibre:series':
                    pathdict['series']=meta.get('content')
                    safe.append(pathdict)        
        print(pathdict)
        
    print(safe)

this code is able to go through all the opf files and get the series, index and path, I'm sure of this, since the console output is this:

However, when I try to store the pathdict to the safe, no matter where I put the safe.append(pathdict) the output is either: or or

What do I have to do, so that the safe=[] has the data shown in image 1? I have tried everything I could think of, but nothing worked.

Any help is appreciated.

Solution

I believe this is the correct way:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup 

def get_opf_path():
    opffile = variables.items
    pathdict = {'index':[], 'path':[], 'series':[]}
    safe = []
    x = 0
    for f in opffile:
        x += 1
        pathdict['path'] = f
        pathdict['index'] = x
        with open(f, 'r') as fi:
            soup = BeautifulSoup(fi, 'lxml')
            for meta in soup.find_all('meta'):
                if meta.get('name') == 'calibre:series':
                    pathdict['series'] = meta.get('content')        
                    print(pathdict)
                    safe.append(pathdict.copy())
    print(safe)

For two main reasons:

1. When you do:

   pathdict['series'] = meta.get('content')
   

   you are overwriting the last value in pathdict['series'] so I believe this is where you should save.

2. You also need to make a copy of it, if you don´t it will change also in the list. When you store the dict you really are storing a reeference to it (in this case, a reference to the variable pathdict.

Note

If you want to print the elements of the list in separated lines you can do something like this:

print(*save, sep="\n")

Answered By - Jorge Morgado