Dictionaries

Dictionaries are a different way to organize data. At first glance, a dictionary may look just like a list. However, dictionaries have different jobs, rules, and different syntax than lists.

Parts of a dictionary like lists, dictionaries have different parts that need to be used to make them work—names, use curly braces to store information. For example, if we wanted to make a dictionary called numbers, we would put the dictionary entries inside curly braces. Here is a simple example to type into your Python shell:

numbers = {'one': 1, 'two': 2, 'three': 3}

Key/value pairs in dictionaries

As you can see in the previous screenshot, the dictionary stores information with things called keys and values. In a dictionary of items, for example, we might have keys that tell us the names of each item and values that tell us how many of each item we have in our inventory. Once we store these items in our dictionary, we can add or remove new items (keys), add new amounts (values), or change...