Read a tab separated file, with headers, into a "list" (or a generator object returning items, but behaves similar), where each dict uses the headers in the first line as keys.

tsv_to_dicts.py

'''
Read a tab separated file, with headers, into a "list" (or better, 
a generator object returning items, but behaves similar), where 
each dict uses the headers in the first line as keys.
Author: Samuel Lampa 2013 - [email protected]
'''

# Open file
infile = open(some_filename)

# Parse first line into column names
col_names = infile.next().split("\t")

# Create a dict from every row in the file (except the header line), 
# with the column names created above
rows_as_dicts = (dict(zip(col_names, row.split("\t"))) for row in infile)

# Look at first line
print rows_as_dicts.next()