2.9. Dictionaries

Dictionaries are Python's hash table type. They work like associative arrays or hashes found in Perl and consist of key-value pairs. Keys can be almost any Python type, but are usually numbers or strings. Values, on the other hand, can be any arbitrary Python object. Dictionaries are enclosed by curly braces ( { } ).

>>> aDict = {}
>>> aDict['host'] = 'earth'
>>> aDict['port'] = 80
>>> aDict
{'host': 'earth', 'port': 80}
>>> aDict.keys()
['host', 'port']
>>> aDict['host']
'earth'

Dictionaries are covered in Chapter 7.