First off, full disclosure: This is going towards a uni assignment, so I don't want to receive code. :). I'm more looking for approaches; I'm very new to python, having read a book but not yet written any code.

The entire task is to import the contents of a CSV file, create a decision tree from the contents of the CSV file (using the ID3 algorithm), and then parse a second CSV file to run against the tree. There's a big (understandable) preference to have it capable of dealing with different CSV files (I asked if we were allowed to hard code the column names, mostly to eliminate it as a possibility, and the answer was no).

The CSV files are in a fairly standard format; the header row is marked with a # then the column names are displayed, and every row after that is a simple series of values. Example:

# Column1, Column2, Column3, Column4
Value01, Value02, Value03, Value04
Value11, Value12, Value13, Value14

At the moment, I'm trying to work out the first part: parsing the CSV. To make the decisions for the decision tree, a dictionary structure seems like it's going to be the most logical; so I was thinking of doing something along these lines:

Read in each line, character by character
If the character is not a comma or a space
    Append character to temporary string
If the character is a comma
    Append the temporary string to a list
    Empty string
Once a line has been read
    Create a dictionary using the header row as the key (somehow!)
    Append that dictionary to a list

However, if I do things that way, I'm not sure how to make a mapping between the keys and the values. I'm also wondering whether there is some way to perform an action on every dictionary in a list, since I'll need to be doing things to the effect of "Everyone return their values for columns Column1 and Column4, so I can count up who has what!" - I assume that there is some mechanism, but I don't think I know how to do it.

Is a dictionary the best way to do it? Would I be better off doing things using some other data structure? If so, what?