Iterating Over a Dictionary

suggest change

If you use a dictionary as an iterator (e.g. in a for statement), it traverses the keys of the dictionary. For example:

d = {'a': 1, 'b': 2, 'c':3}
for key in d:
    print(key, d[key])
# c 3
# b 2
# a 1

The same is true when used in a comprehension

print([key for key in d])
# ['c', 'b', 'a']

The items() method can be used to loop over both the key and value simultaneously:

for key, value in d.items():
    print(key, value)
# c 3
# b 2
# a 1

While the values() method can be used to iterate over only the values, as would be expected:

for key, value in d.values():
    print(key, value)
    # 3
    # 2
    # 1

Here, the methods keys(), values() and items() return lists, and there are the three extra methods iterkeys() itervalues() and iteritems() to return iteraters.

Feedback about page:

Feedback:
Optional: your email if you want me to get back to you:


Dictionary:
* Iterating Over a Dictionary

Table Of Contents
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
126 Arrays
132 2to3 tool
135 Unicode
138 Neo4j
140 Curses
141 Templates
145 heapq
146 tkinter
154 Audio
155 pyglet
157 ijson
160 Flask
161 Groupby
163 pygame
165 hashlib
166 Gzip
167 ctypes
185 pyaudio
186 shelve