Think Julia

Chapter 11. Dictionaries

This chapter presents another built-in type called a dictionary.

A Dictionary Is a Mapping

A dictionary is like an array, but more general. In an array, the indices have to be integers; in a dictionary they can be (almost) any type.

A dictionary contains a collection of indices, which are called keys, and a collection of values. Each key is associated with a single value. The association of a key and a value is called a key-value pair, or sometimes an item.

In mathematical language, a dictionary represents a mapping from keys to values, so you can also say that each key “maps to” a value. As an example, we’ll build a dictionary that maps from English to Spanish words, so the keys and the values are all strings.

The function Dict creates a new dictionary with no items (because Dict is the name of a built-in function, you should avoid using it as a variable name):

julia> eng2sp = Dict()
Dict{Any,Any} with 0 entries

The types of the keys and values in the dictionary are specified in curly braces: here, both are of type Any.

The dictionary is empty. To add items to the dictionary, you can use square brackets:

julia> eng2sp["one"] = "uno";

This line creates an item that maps from the key "one" to the value "uno". If we print the dictionary again, we see a key-value pair with an arrow => between the key and value:

julia> eng2sp
Dict{Any,Any} with 1 entry:
  "one" => "uno"

This output format is also an input format. For example, you can create a new dictionary ...