10.2 Dictionary creation

Learning objectives

By the end of this section you should be able to

• Create a dictionary object with given key/value pairs.

Dictionary creation

Two methods exist for creating an empty dictionary:

• Using curly braces {}. Ex: dict_1 = {}.
• Using the dict() function. Ex: dict_2 = dict().

A dictionary object can also be created with initial key-value pairs enclosed in curly braces. Ex: my_dict = {"pizza": 2, "pasta": 3, "drink": 4} creates a dictionary object my_dict. A key and associated value are separated by a colon, and key-value pairs are separated by commas.

dict for dictionary creation

A dictionary object can be created with initial key-value pairs using the dict() function.

• Creating a dictionary from a list of tuples. my_list = [("apple", 2), ("banana", 3), ("orange", 4)] my_dict = dict(my_list)
• Creating a dictionary using keyword arguments. my_dict = dict(apple=2, banana=3, orange=4)
• Creating a dictionary from another dictionary. old_dict = {"apple": 2, "banana": 3, "orange": 4} new_dict = dict(old_dict)