Need help making this program please ASAP!!

Step 1: Create an empty list (of dictionaries)
Step 2: Prompt the user for the scoring matrix file name
Step 3: Open the file and read the contents as a list of strings. Ignore the comment lines
Step 4: When you reach a line that doesn’t start with '#' read in the amino acid symbols and split them into your keys for your dictionary
Step 5: Read in the rest of the lines one at a time. For each line:
Step 5a. Slice off the first character (amino acid).
Step 5b. For the rest of the string split into individual numbers and convert to a list of integers (use a list comprehension). This is your data for your dictionary.
Step 5c. Zip the keys and data together and convert into a dictionary.
Step 5d. Add the dictionary to the list of dictionaries
Step 6: After you’ve read all lines, create the dictionary of dictionaries by zipping the keys and the list of dictionaries and convert into a dictionary.

Good luck with that one; I recommend posting the code you've started writing for it and the questions you ran into when you got stuck.

Step 1: Create an empty list (of dictionaries)
If the list is empty, how would it contain dictionaries?

In addition to posting an effort please also show sample input with expected output. If it happens that you solve the problem then you need not post again.

keys = ['', '', '']

name1 = ['', '', '']
name2 = ['', '', '']

dictList = []
dictList.append(dict(zip(keys, name1)))
dictList.append(dict(zip(keys, name2)))

print dictList
for item in dictList:
print ' '.join([item[key] for key in keys])

prot_filename = raw_input("Enter filename: ")
prot_file = open(prot_filename, 'r')
aa_seq = prot_file.read()
prot_file.close()

for line in open("file"):
li=line.strip()
if not li.startswith("#"):
print line.rstrip()

for sequence in message.split(" "):
if sequence.startswith('<')
sequence = sequence[1:-1]

You need to wrap your code in code-tags - this is particularly important for Python (see the previous poster's signature).

Your last line could/should be



although I assume it still works with the -1.