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.

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