Python dictionaries

Dictionaries are a useful data type in Python for various purposes. Below are some examples.

Dictionaries are created using the curly brackets {...}. They can be indexed into like lists or tuples, but instead of having the indexes 0, 1, 2, ... the keys can be any immutable Python objects.

Here is a dictionary with 3 keys: 1, 50, 1000. The value for each key is the number written as a string:

>>> d = {1:'one', 50:'fifty', 1000:'one thousand'}

>>> d[1]
'one'

>>> d[50]
'fifty'

>>> d[2]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
KeyError: 2

The value for key 2 has not yet been defined, but we can define it now:

>>> d[2] = 'two'

>>> d
{1000: 'one thousand', 1: 'one', 50: 'fifty', 2: 'two'}

The keys do not have to be integers, they can be any immutable object, e.g.:

>>> colors = {}   # empty dictionary

>>> colors['red'] = '#ff0000'
>>> colors['blue'] = '#0000ff'

if you want to keep track of the html string for various colors (see Colors).

Dictionary methods

Several methods are defined on dictionaries, e.g.

>>> colors.keys()
['blue', 'red']

>>> colors.values()
['#0000ff', '#ff0000']

>>> colors.items()
[('blue', '#0000ff'), ('red', '#ff0000')]

Note that each returns a list. The last returns a list of tuples.

To iterate over a dictionary, you can iterate over one of the lists above, or to avoid having Python create a list (useful when the dictionary is very large), you can use the iteritems method, which returns an iterable in the form of tuples (key,value):

>>> for key,value in colors.iteritems():
...     print "%s : %s" % (key.rjust(10), value)
...
      blue : #0000ff
       red : #ff0000

Note that key.rjust(10) right justifies the key in a field of 10 characters. If the key might not be a string, you could use str(key).rjust(10), e.g.

>>> for k,v in d.iteritems():
...     print "%s : %s" % (str(k).rjust(10), v)
...
      1000 : one thousand
         1 : one
        50 : fifty
         2 : two

Note that ordering of items in the dictionary can be quite random. If the keys have some natural ordering and you want to process them in this order, try something like:

>>> keys = d.keys()
>>> keys
[1000, 1, 50, 2]

>>> keys.sort()
>>> keys
[1, 2, 50, 1000]

>>> for k in keys:
...     print "%s : %s" % (str(k).rjust(10), d[k])
...
         1 : one
         2 : two
        50 : fifty
      1000 : one thousand

Further reading

• http://docs.python.org/tutorial/datastructures.html#dictionaries
• http://diveintopython.org/native_data_types/index.html#odbchelper.dict