- A symbol for a heart. Usually used when you type it in the space bar of the computer because you are lonely. Or used when texting that special someone.; ). Or when texting your mom because again you're lonely. Or just really love your mom. Or your mom is cool enough to understand internet slang.
- Strings, Lists, Arrays, and Dictionaries¶. The most import data structure for scientific computing in Python is the NumPy array.NumPy arrays are used to store lists of numerical data and to represent vectors, matrices, and even tensors.
- Python 3 - dictionary items Method - The method items returns a list of dict's (key, value) tuple pairs.
- A dictionary can also contain many dictionaries, this is called nested dictionaries. Create a dictionary that contain three dictionaries: myfamily = 'child1'.
Like a super-thesaurus, search results display semantic as well as lexical results including synonyms, hierarchical subordination, antonyms, holonyms, and entailment.
1.12.1. Definition and Use of Dictionaries¶
In common usage, a dictionary is a collection of words matched withtheir definitions. Given a word, you can look up its definition.Python has a built in dictionary type called dict which you can useto create dictionaries with arbitrary definitions for characterstrings. It can be used for the common usage, as in a simpleEnglish-Spanish dictionary.
Look at the example program spanish1.py and run it.
First an empty dictionary is created using dict(), and it isassigned the descriptive name spanish.
To refer to the definition for a word, you use the dictionary name,follow it by the word inside square brackets. This notation caneither be used on the left-hand side of an assignment to make (orremake) a definition, or it can be used in an expression (as in theprint functions), where its earlier definition is retrieved. For example,
makes an entry in our spanishdictionary for 'hello' , with definition 'hola'.
retrieves the definition for 'red', which is 'rojo'.
Since the Spanish dictionary is defined at the top-level, thevariable name spanish is still defined after the program runs:After running the program, use spanish in the Shell to checkout the translations of some more words, other than 'two' and'red'.
Creating the dictionary is a well defined and quite different activity from the useof the dictionary at the end of the code,so we can use a functions to encapsulate the task of creating the dictionary,as in the example program spanish2.py, which givesthe same result:
This code illustrates several things about functions.
- First, like whole files, functions can have a documentationstring immediately after the definition heading. It is a good ideato document the return value!
- The dictionary that is created is returned, but the localvariable name in the function,
spanish, is lost when thefunction terminates. - To remember the dictionary returned to
main, it needs aname. The name does not have to match the name used increateDictionary. The namedictionaryis descriptive.
Dictionary 123
We could also use the dictionary more extensively. The exampleprogram spanish2a.py is the same as above except it has thefollowing main method:
Try it, and check that it makes sense.
Python dictionaries are actually more general than the common useof dictionaries. They do not have to associate words and theirstring definitions. They can associate many types of objects withsome arbitrary object. The more general Python terminology for wordand definition are key and value. Given a key, you can look upthe corresponding value. The only restriction on the key is that itbe an immutable type. This means that a value of the key's typecannot be changed internally after it is initially created. Stringsand numbers are immutable. A dictionary is mutable: its value canbe changed internally. (You can add new definitions to it!) We willsee more mutable and immutable types later and explore more of theinternal workings of data types.
1.12.1.1. Number Dictionary Exercise¶
Write a tiny Python program numDict.py that makes adictionary whose keys are the words ‘one', ‘two', ‘three', and‘four', and whose corresponding values are the numericalequivalents, 1, 2, 3, and 4 (of type int, not strings). Include code totest the resulting dictionary by referencing several of thedefinitions and printing the results.
(This dictionaryillustrates simply that the values in a Python dictionary are notrequired to be strings.)
This chapter covers the second fundamental data structure in Python: dictionaries, which represent a collection of key-value pairs. They are similar to lists, except that each element in the dictionary is also given a distinct 'name' to refer to it by (instead of an index number). Dictionaries are Python's primary version of maps, which is a common and extremely useful way of organizing data in a computer program—indeed, I would argue that maps are the most useful data structure in programming. This chapter will describe how to create, access, and utilize dictionaries to organize and structure data.
9.1 What is a Dictionary?
A dictionary is a lot like a list, in that it is a (one-dimensional) sequence of values that are all stored in a single variable. However, rather than using integers as the indexes for each of the elements, a dictionary allows you to use a wide variety of different data types (including strings and tuples) as the 'index'. These 'indices' are called keys, and each is used to refer to a specific value in the collection. Thus a dictionary is an sequence of key-value pairs: each element has a 'key' that is used to look up (reference) the 'value'.
This is a lot like a real-world dictionary or encyclopedia, in which the words (keys) are used to look up the definitions (values). A phone book works the same way (the names are the keys, the phone numbers are the values),
Dictionaries provide a mapping of keys to values: they specify a set of data (the keys), and how that data 'transforms' into another set of data (the values).
Dictionaries are written as literals inside curly braces ({}). Key-value pairs are written with a colon (:) between the key and the value, and each element (pair) in the dictionary is separated by a comma (,):
Style Requirement: Dictionary variables are often named as plurals, but can also be named after the mapping they performed (e.g., english_to_spanish).
Be careful not to name a dictionary dict, which is a reserved keyword (it's a function used to create dictionaries).
Dictionary keys can be of any hashable type (meaning the computer can consistently convert it into a number). In practice, this means that that keys are most commonly strings, numbers, or tuples. Dictionary values, on the other hand, can be of any type that you want!
Dictionary keys must be unique: because they are used to 'look up' values, there has to be a single value associated with each key (this is called a one-to-one mapping in mathematics). But dictionary values can be duplicated: just like how two words may have the same definition in a real-world dictionary!
It is important to note that dictionaries are an unordered collection of key-value pairs! Because you reference a value by its key and not by its position (as you do in a list), the exact ordering of those elements doesn't matter—the interpreter just goes immediately to the value associated with the key. This also means that when you print out a dictionary, the order in which the elements are printed may not match the order in which you specified them in the literal (and in fact, may differ between script executions or across computers!)
The above examples mostly use dictionaries as 'lookup tables': they provide a way of 'translating' from some set of keys to some set of values. However, dictionaries are also extremely useful for grouping together related data—for example, information about a specific person:
Using a dictionary allows you to track the different values with named keys, rather than needing to remember whether the person's name or title was the first element!
Dictionaries can also be created from lists of keys and values. To do this, you first use the built-in zip() function to create a non-list collection of tuples (each a key-value pair), and then use the built-in dict() function to create a dictionary out of that collection. Alternatively, the built-in enumerate() function will create an collection with the index of each list element as its key.
9.2 Accessing a Dictionary
Just as with lists, you retrieve a value from a dictionary using bracket notation, but you put the key inside the brackets instead of the positional index (since dictionaries are unordered!).
To reiterate: you put the key inside the brackets in order to access the value. You cannot directly put in a value in order to determine its key (because it may have more than one!)
It is worth noting that 'looking up' a value by its key is a very 'fast' operation (it doesn't take the interpreter a lot of time or effort). But looking up the key for a value takes time: you need to check each and every key in the dictionary to see if it has the value you're interested in! This concept is discussed in more detail in Chapter 11.
As with lists, you can put any expression (including variables) inside the brackets as long as it resolves to a valid key (whether that key is a string, integer, or tuple).
As with lists, you can mutate (change) the dictionary by assigning values to the bracket-notation variable. This changes the key-value pair to have a different value, but the same key:
Note that adding new elements (key-value pairs) works differently than lists: with a list, you cannot assign a value to an index that is out of bounds: you need to use the append() method instead. With a dictionary, you can assign a value to a non-existent key. This creates the key, assigning it the given value.
9.3 Dictionary Methods
https://software-sun.mystrikingly.com/blog/unreal-tournament-3-demo-download-free. Plyr(player). Dictionaries support a few different operations and methods, though not as many as lists. These include:
Dictionaries also include three methods that return list-like sequences of the dictionary's elements:
The keys(), values(), and items() sequences are not quite lists (they don't have all of the list operations and methods), but they do support the in operator and iteration with for loops (see below). And as demonstrated above, they can easily be converted into lists if needed. Note that the items() method produces a sequence of tuples—each key-value pair is represented as a tuple whose first element is the key and second is the value!
9.4 Dictionaries and Loops
Just as with lists, you retrieve a value from a dictionary using bracket notation, but you put the key inside the brackets instead of the positional index (since dictionaries are unordered!).
To reiterate: you put the key inside the brackets in order to access the value. You cannot directly put in a value in order to determine its key (because it may have more than one!)
It is worth noting that 'looking up' a value by its key is a very 'fast' operation (it doesn't take the interpreter a lot of time or effort). But looking up the key for a value takes time: you need to check each and every key in the dictionary to see if it has the value you're interested in! This concept is discussed in more detail in Chapter 11.
As with lists, you can put any expression (including variables) inside the brackets as long as it resolves to a valid key (whether that key is a string, integer, or tuple).
As with lists, you can mutate (change) the dictionary by assigning values to the bracket-notation variable. This changes the key-value pair to have a different value, but the same key:
Note that adding new elements (key-value pairs) works differently than lists: with a list, you cannot assign a value to an index that is out of bounds: you need to use the append() method instead. With a dictionary, you can assign a value to a non-existent key. This creates the key, assigning it the given value.
9.3 Dictionary Methods
https://software-sun.mystrikingly.com/blog/unreal-tournament-3-demo-download-free. Plyr(player). Dictionaries support a few different operations and methods, though not as many as lists. These include:
Dictionaries also include three methods that return list-like sequences of the dictionary's elements:
The keys(), values(), and items() sequences are not quite lists (they don't have all of the list operations and methods), but they do support the in operator and iteration with for loops (see below). And as demonstrated above, they can easily be converted into lists if needed. Note that the items() method produces a sequence of tuples—each key-value pair is represented as a tuple whose first element is the key and second is the value!
9.4 Dictionaries and Loops
Dictionaries are iterable collections (like lists, ranges, strings, files, etc), and so you can loop through them with a for loop. Note that the basic for . in . syntax iterates through the dictionary's keys (not its values)! Thus it is much more common to iterate through one of the keys(), values(), or items() sequences.
It is much more common to use multiple assignment to give the items() tuple elements local variable names, allowing you to refer to those elements by name rather than by index:
Finally, remember that dictionaries are unordered. This means that there is no consistency as to which element will be processed in what order: you might get a then b then c, but you might get c then a then b! If the order is important for looping, a common strategy is to iterate through a sorted list of the keys (produced with the built-in sorted() function):
9.5 Nesting Dictionaries
Although dictionary keys are limited to hashable types (e.g., strings, numbers, tuples), dictionary values can be of any type—and this includes lists and other dictionaries!
Nested dictionaries are conceptually similar to nested lists, and are used in a similar manner:
The ability to nest dictionaries inside of dictionaries is incredibly powerful, and allows you to define arbitrarily complex information structurings (schemas). Indeed, most data in computer programs—as well as public information available on the web—is structured as a set of nested maps like this (though possibly with some level of abstraction).
The other common format used with nested lists and dictionaries is to define a list of dictionaries where each dictionary has the same keys (but different values). For example:
This structure can be seen as a list of records (the dictionaries), each of which have a number of different features (the key-value pairs). This list of feature records is in fact a common way of understanding a data table like you would create as an Excel spreadsheet:
| name | height | weight |
|---|---|---|
| Ada | 64 | 135 |
| Bob | 74 | 156 |
| Chris | 69 | 139 |
| Diya | 69 | 144 |
| Emma | 71 | 152 |
Dictionaries 1 3 3 =
Each dictionary (record) acts as a 'row' in the table, and each key (feature) acts as a 'column'. As long as all of the dictionaries share the same keys, this list of dictionaries is a table!
When working with large amounts of tabular data, like you might read from a .csv file, this is a good structure to use.
In order to analyze this kind of data table, you most often will loop through the elements in the list (the rows in the table), doing some calculations based on each dictionary:
This is effective, but not particularly efficient (or simple). We will discuss more robust and powerful ways of working with this style of data table more in a later chapter.
9.6 Which Data Structure Do I Use?
The last two chapters have introduced multiple different data structures built into Python: lists, tuples, and dictionaries. They all represent collections of elements, though in somewhat different ways. So when do you each each type?
Use lists for any ordered sequence of data (e.g., if you care about what comes first), or if you are collecting elements of the same general 'type' (e.g., a lot of numbers, a lot of strings, etc.). If you're not sure what else to use, a list is a great default data structure.
Use tuples when you need to ensure that a list is immutable (cannot be changed), such as if you want it to be a key to a dictionary or a parameter to a function. Tuples are also nice if you just want to store a small set of data (only a few items) that is not going to change. Sublime text 3 3210. Finally, tuples may potentially provide an 'easier' syntax than lists in certain situations, such as when using multiple assignment.
Use dictionaries whenever you need to represent a mapping of data and want to link some set of keys to some set of values. If you want to be able to 'name' each value in your collection, you can use a dictionary. If you want to work with key-value pairs, you need to use a dictionary (or some other dictionary-like data structure).
Dictionaries 1 3 3 0
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