Iterating Over Dictionaries

Hello,

How does Python know what state means when you iterate over the dictionary? It’s the first time the word has been used in the programme (it’s not been assigned any variable so far) and I assume it’s not in Python’s built-in scope either.

Thanks in advance.

How does python know what state and city are?

Thanks!

Hi @arthur55 and @moandbah. In this example, state is what’s called a loop variable:

capitals = {
    "California": "Sacramento",
    "New York": "Albany",
    "Texas": "Austin",
}

for state in capitals:
    print(state, capitals[state])

While looping over the dictionary keys, Python assigns one key after another to the loop variable. In this case, Philipp called it state, but you could name it anything else.

Check out the detailed explanation in the lesson on while and for loops.

Thanks for the answer Martin. Just wanted to add my comment here as well that it had been the hardest part to understand in this lesson. How the loop variables ‘know’ what is key and what is value.

for ship, captain in captains.items():
    print(ship, captain)

Here I create two loop variables, and ask to get them printed for every loop. I just cannot seem to understand why the loop knows what is key, and what is value and that it gets assigned and printed correctly OTHER than it’s just how it is / this just works.

Hi Steinar! That’s such a great question, as there are indeed quite a few things happening here :)

You can investigate the .items() dictionary method by using it without the for loop. Here is an example with a different dictionary:

>>> user = {"name": "Steinar", "location": "Real Python"}
>>> user.items()
dict_items([('name', 'Steinar'), ('location', 'Real Python')])

The user dictionary has the keys "name" and "location", and the values "Steinar" and "Real Python”. When you run user.items(), then Python returns a dict_items object. You can think of this dict_items object as a list.

Now, have a closer look at the content of dict_items:

[('name', 'Steinar'), ('location', 'Real Python')]

Generally speaking, it’s an iterable with two tuples where the first item is the key and the second item is the value of the user dictionary.

Since .items() returns an iterable, you can loop over it. Coming back to your example, you could loop over captains.items() like this:

for captains_data in captains.items():
    print(captains_data[0], captains_data[1])

Just like Martin mentioned above, you can name the variable in the for loop however you like. Note, that I’m just using one variable named captains_data in this example. That means, that captains_data remains a tuple with the ship on index 0 (key) and the captain at index 1 (value).

Since every step of the for loop returns a tuple, you can unpack the tuple right away. And that’s what you commonly do when you use .items(). That way, you can save yourself an extra step:

for ship, captain in captains.items():
    print(ship, captain)

When you unpack the tuple, the order of your variable naming is important. The first variable is always the key and the second variable is always the value. That’s why ship matches with the keys of your captains dictionary and captain matches with the values when you print them.