As you can see, we’ve broken a larger dictionary into several lines.
Each
key is the name of a person who responded to the poll, and each value is
their language choice. When you know you’ll need more than one line to
define a dictionary, press ENTER after the opening brace. Then indent the
next line one level (four spaces) and write the first key-value pair, followed
by a comma. From this point forward when you press ENTER, your text edi-
tor should automatically indent all subsequent key-value pairs to match the
first key-value pair.
Once you’ve finished defining the dictionary, add a closing brace on a
new line after the last key-value pair, and indent it one level so it aligns with
the keys in the dictionary. It’s good practice to include a comma after the
last key-value pair as well, so you’re ready to add a new key-value pair on the
next line.
NOTE Most editors have some functionality that helps you format extended lists and dic-
tionaries in a similar manner to this example. Other acceptable ways to format long
dictionaries are available as well, so you may see slightly different formatting in your
editor, or in other sources.
To use this dictionary, given the name of a person who took the poll,
you can easily look up their favorite language:
favorite favorite_languages = {
_languages.py 'jen': 'python',
'sarah': 'c',
'edward': 'rust',
'phil': 'python',
}
1 language = favorite_languages['sarah'].title()
print(f"Sarah's favorite language is {language}.")
To see which language Sarah chose, we ask for the value at:
favorite_languages['sarah']
We use this syntax to pull Sarah’s favorite language from the dictionary 1
and assign it to the variable language. Creating a new variable here makes for a
much cleaner print() call. The output shows Sarah’s favorite language:
Sarah's favorite language is C.
You could use this same syntax with any individual represented in the
dictionary.
Using get() to Access Values
Using keys in square brackets to retrieve the value you’re interested in from a
dictionary might cause one potential problem: if the key you ask for doesn’t
exist, you’ll get an error.
Dictionaries 97
