Accessing keys and values

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When working with dictionaries, it’s often necessary to access all the keys and values in the dictionary, either in a for loop, a list comprehension, or just as a plain list.

Given a dictionary like:

mydict = {
    'a': '1',
    'b': '2'
}

You can get a list of keys using the keys() method:

print(mydict.keys())
# Python2: ['a', 'b']
# Python3: dict_keys(['b', 'a'])

If instead you want a list of values, use the values() method:

print(mydict.values())
# Python2: ['1', '2']
# Python3: dict_values(['2', '1'])

If you want to work with both the key and its corresponding value, you can use the items() method:

print(mydict.items())
# Python2: [('a', '1'), ('b', '2')]
# Python3: dict_items([('b', '2'), ('a', '1')])

NOTE: Because a dict is unsorted, keys(), values(), and items() have no sort order. Use sort(), sorted(), or an OrderedDict if you care about the order that these methods return.

Python 2/3 Difference: In Python 3, these methods return special iterable objects, not lists, and are the equivalent of the Python 2 iterkeys(), itervalues(), and iteritems() methods. These objects can be used like lists for the most part, though there are some differences. See PEP 3106 for more details.

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Dictionary:
* Accessing keys and values

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2 Filter
3 List
7 Loops
22 Reduce
26 Dictionary
27 Classes
31 Set
42 Tuple
45 Enum
62 Sockets
89 urllib
92 Idioms
104 Stack
105 Profiling
109 Logging
111 os module
118 Mixins
120 ArcPy
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132 2to3 tool
135 Unicode
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145 heapq
146 tkinter
154 Audio
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157 ijson
160 Flask
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163 pygame
165 hashlib
166 Gzip
167 ctypes
185 pyaudio
186 shelve