sparse vector in python?

[Sumit_6]

A sparse vector is a vector whose entries are almost all zero, like [1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0]. Storing all those zeros wastes memory and dictionaries are commonly used to keep track of just the nonzero entries. For example, the vector shown earlier can be represented as {0:1, 7:2}, since the vector it is meant to represent has the value 1 at index 0 and the value 2 at index 7. Write a function that converts a dictionary back to its sparese vector representation.

Examples

>>> convertDictionary({0: 1, 3: 2, 7: 3, 12: 4})
[1, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 3, 0, 0, 0, 0, 4]
>>> convertDictionary({0: 1, 2: 1, 4: 2, 6: 1, 9: 1})
[1, 0, 1, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1]
>>> convertDictionary({})
[]

i am totally stuck with this problem, :( trying but nothing comes to my mind.

[woooee]

Frist you have to determine the length of the final list. Then append zeroes unless the list offset is in the dictionary passed to the function.

def convert_dictionary(dict_in):
    """ a dictionary's keys are not necessarily in entry order
    """
    print max(dict_in.keys())
    print dict_in.keys()

convert_dictionary({0: 1, 2: 1, 4: 2, 6: 1, 9: 1})