Think Python, 2nd Edition

Chapter 11. Dictionaries

This chapter presents another built-in type called a dictionary. Dictionaries are one of Python’s best features; they are the building blocks of many efficient and elegant algorithms.

A Dictionary Is a Mapping

A dictionary is like a list, but more general. In a list, 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.

>>> eng2sp = dict()
>>> eng2sp
{}

The squiggly brackets, {}, represent an empty dictionary. To add items to the dictionary, you can use square brackets:

>>> 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 a colon between the key and value:

>>> eng2sp
{'one': 'uno'}

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

>>> eng2sp ...