Mastering Vim

Dictionaries

Dictionaries are also supported in Vim:

let animal_names = {  \ 'cat': 'Miss Cattington',  \ 'dog': 'Mr Dogson',  \ 'parrot': 'Polly'  \ }

As you may have noticed, you need to explicitly outline the line breaks with a backslash \ if you're defining a dictionary on multiple lines.

Dictionary modification operations are similar to the ones familiar to you from Python. Elements can be accessed in two ways:

let cat_name = animal_names['cat']  " get an elementlet cat_name = animal_names.cat     " another way to access an element

Accessing an element via . only works if the key contains numbers, letters, and underscores.

You can set or override a dictionary entry as follows:

let animal_names['raven'] = 'Raven R. Raventon'

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