.. 8.4 LO: dictionaries (2)
.. ------------------------
.. * empty 
.. * filled 
.. * accessing via keys 
.. * .values(), .keys() 
.. * in 
.. * iteration

============
Dictionaries
============

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Welcome to the spoken tutorial on dictionaries.

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In this tutorial, we will see how to create empty dictionaries, learn
about keys and values of dictionaries. Checking for elements and
iterating over elements.

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A dictionary in general, is designed to look up meanings of
words. Similarly, Python dictionary is also designed to look up for a
specific key and retrieve the corresponding value. Dictionaries are
data structures that provide key-value mappings.  Dictionaries are
similar to lists except that instead of the values having integer
indexes, dictionaries have keys or strings as indexes.

Before we can proceed, start your IPython interpreter with the
``-pylab`` option.

{{{ start ipython interpreter by issuing command ipython -pylab }}}

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Let us start by creating an empty dictionary, type the following in
your IPython interpreter.
::

    mt_dict = {}    

Notice that unlike lists curly braces are used define ``dictionary``,

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Now let us see how to create a filled dictionary,
::

    extensions = {'jpg' : 'JPEG Image', 'py' : 'Python script', 'html' : 'Html document', 'pdf' : 'Portable Document Format'}

Notice that each key-value pair is separated by a comma

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and each key and value are separated using a colon.

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Here, we defined four entries in the dictionary extensions. The keys
are

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jpg, py, html, and pdf.

Simply type,
::

    extensions

in the interpreter to see the content of the dictionary. Notice that
in dictionaries the order cannot be predicted and you can see that the
values are not in the order that we entered in.

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Like in lists, the elements in a dictionary can be accessed using the
index, here the index is the key. Try,
::

    print extensions['jpg']

It printed JPEG Image. And now try,
::

    print extensions['zip']

Well it gave us an error, saying that the key 'zip' is not in the
dictionary.

Pause here for some time and try few more keys. Also try jpg in
capital letters.

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dictionaries }}}

Well that was about creating dictionaries, now how do we add or delete
items. We can add new items into dictionaries as,
::

    extensions['cpp'] = 'C++ code'

and delete items using the ``del`` keyword as,
::

    del extension['pdf']

Let us check the content of the dictionary now,
::

    extensions

So the changes have been made. Now let us try one more thing,
::

    extensions['cpp'] = 'C++ source code'
    extensions

As you can see, it did not add a new thing nor gave an error, but it
simply replaces the existing value with the new one.

Now let us learn how to check if a particular key is present in the
dictionary. For that we can use ``in``,
::

    'py' in extensions
    'odt' in extensions

So in short it will return ``True`` if the key is found in the
dictionary, and will return ``False`` if key is not present. Note that
we can check only for container-ship of keys in dictionaries and not
values.

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Now let us see how to retrieve the keys and values. We can use the
method ``keys()`` for getting a list of the keys in a particular
dictionary and the method ``values()`` for getting a list of
values. Let us try them,
::

    extensions.keys()

It returned the ``list`` of keys in the dictionary extensions. And now
the other one,
::

    extensions.values()

It returned the ``list`` of values in the dictionary.

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exercise }}}

Now let us try to print the data in the dictionary. We can use ``for``
loop to iterate. Pause here and try to do it yourself.

It can be solved as,
::

    for each in extensions.keys():
        print each, "-->", extensions[each]


{{{ switch to next slide, summary }}}

This brings us to the end of this tutorial, we learned dictionaries
and saw how to create an empty dictionary, build a dictionary with
some data in it, adding data, ``keys()`` and ``values()`` methods, and
iterating over the dictionaries.

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Thank you!

..  Author: Anoop Jacob Thomas <anoop@fossee.in>
    Reviewer 1:
    Reviewer 2:
    External reviewer: