How to get the item at a specific index of a dictionary in Python?
Published on Aug. 22, 2023, 12:17 p.m.
Dictionaries in Python are unordered, so there is no concept of an index of a dictionary. However, you can access the value of a dictionary by its key. To retrieve the value of a dictionary corresponding to a particular key, you can use the square bracket ([]
) notation for indexing. Here is an example:
my_dict = {'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}
print(my_dict['key1']) # Output: 'value1'
In this example, my_dict['key1']
is used to retrieve the value of the key 'key1'
in my_dict
.
If you want to access dictionary values by their order, you can convert the dictionary to a list of tuples using the items()
method, which returns an iterable of key-value pairs. You can then access the value at a specific index in this list. Here’s an example:
my_dict = {'key1': 'value1', 'key2': 'value2'}
dict_items = list(my_dict.items())
print(dict_items[0][1]) # Output: 'value1'
In this example, dict_items
is a list of tuples containing the key-value pairs in my_dict
. The value of the first key key1
can be accessed using the index [0][1]
in the dict_items
list.
Note that this method only works for Python versions 3.7 and newer, as dictionaries before this version were unordered.