Daniel Arbuckle's Mastering Python

Dictionaries

The first data structure we're going to look at is Python's dictionary. A dictionary consists of any number of key-value pairs. The key can be used to get or set the value or remove the pair from the dictionary entirely.

Similar data structures in other languages are sometimes called maps or hash tables.

There are several ways to create a dictionary in Python. The simplest is to use a dictionary expression, which is just a pair of curly brackets surrounding the key-value pairs we want in the dictionary. Each key-value pair is marked with a colon between the key and value, and each pair is separated by a comma, as shown in the following code example:

example_dict = {'a' :1, 'b' :2, 'c' :3} 

When this expression runs, the result ...