Python: Essential Reference, Third Edition

Operations on Dictionaries

Dictionaries provide a mapping between names and objects. You can apply the following operations to dictionaries:

Operation	Description
x = d[k]	Indexing by key
d[k] = x	Assignment by key
del d[k]	Deletes an item by key
len(d)	Number of items in the dictionary

Key values can be any immutable object, such as strings, numbers, and tuples. In addition, dictionary keys can be specified as a comma-separated list of values, like this:

d = { }
d[1,2,3] = "foo"
d[1,0,3] = "bar"

In this case, the key values represent a tuple, making the preceding assignments identical to the following:

d[(1,2,3)] = "foo"
d[(1,0,3)] = "bar"