1612

Can I use list comprehension syntax to create a dictionary?

For example, by iterating over pairs of keys and values:

d = {... for k, v in zip(keys, values)}
2
  • 1
    Related: collections.Counter is a specialized type of dict for counting things: Using a dictionary to count the items in a list Commented May 26, 2020 at 23:09
  • 3
    If you weren't using zip(...) and using a separate dict, you'll need to do something like d = {... for (k, v) in other_dict.items()} Commented Mar 21, 2023 at 1:43

17 Answers 17

2364

Use a dict comprehension (Python 2.7 and later):

{key: value for key, value in zip(keys, values)}

Alternatively, use the dict constructor:

pairs = [('a', 1), ('b', 2)]
dict(pairs)                          # → {'a': 1, 'b': 2}
dict((k, v + 10) for k, v in pairs)  # → {'a': 11, 'b': 12}

Given separate lists of keys and values, use the dict constructor with zip:

keys = ['a', 'b']
values = [1, 2]
dict(zip(keys, values))              # → {'a': 1, 'b': 2}
Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

2 Comments

what if I have a case of list of words ['cat','dog','cat'] and I want to make a dict with key as word and value as count? Is there a short efficient syntax for that?
@cryanbhu if what you mean is to count the repetitions of a given element in the list, there's a Counter class in the collections package: docs.python.org/2/library/collections.html#collections.Counter
304

In Python 3 and Python 2.7+, dictionary comprehensions look like the below:

d = {k:v for k, v in iterable}

For Python 2.6 or earlier, see fortran's answer.

Comments

74

In fact, you don't even need to iterate over the iterable if it already comprehends some kind of mapping, the dict constructor doing it graciously for you:

>>> ts = [(1, 2), (3, 4), (5, 6)]
>>> dict(ts)
{1: 2, 3: 4, 5: 6}
>>> gen = ((i, i+1) for i in range(1, 6, 2))
>>> gen
<generator object <genexpr> at 0xb7201c5c>
>>> dict(gen)
{1: 2, 3: 4, 5: 6}

Comments

54

Create a dictionary with list comprehension in Python

I like the Python list comprehension syntax.

Can it be used to create dictionaries too? For example, by iterating over pairs of keys and values:

mydict = {(k,v) for (k,v) in blah blah blah}

You're looking for the phrase "dict comprehension" - it's actually:

mydict = {k: v for k, v in iterable}

Assuming blah blah blah is an iterable of two-tuples - you're so close. Let's create some "blahs" like that:

blahs = [('blah0', 'blah'), ('blah1', 'blah'), ('blah2', 'blah'), ('blah3', 'blah')]

Dict comprehension syntax:

Now the syntax here is the mapping part. What makes this a dict comprehension instead of a set comprehension (which is what your pseudo-code approximates) is the colon, : like below:

mydict = {k: v for k, v in blahs}

And we see that it worked, and should retain insertion order as-of Python 3.7:

>>> mydict
{'blah0': 'blah', 'blah1': 'blah', 'blah2': 'blah', 'blah3': 'blah'}

In Python 2 and up to 3.6, order was not guaranteed:

>>> mydict
{'blah0': 'blah', 'blah1': 'blah', 'blah3': 'blah', 'blah2': 'blah'}

Adding a Filter:

All comprehensions feature a mapping component and a filtering component that you can provide with arbitrary expressions.

So you can add a filter part to the end:

>>> mydict = {k: v for k, v in blahs if not int(k[-1]) % 2}
>>> mydict
{'blah0': 'blah', 'blah2': 'blah'}

Here we are just testing for if the last character is divisible by 2 to filter out data before mapping the keys and values.

Comments

45

In Python 2.7, it goes like:

>>> list1, list2 = ['a', 'b', 'c'], [1,2,3]
>>> dict( zip( list1, list2))
{'a': 1, 'c': 3, 'b': 2}

Zip them!

1 Comment

This doesn't address the question at all.
34

Python version >= 2.7, do the below:

d = {i: True for i in [1,2,3]}

Python version < 2.7(RIP, 3 July 2010 - 31 December 2019), do the below:

d = dict((i,True) for i in [1,2,3])

1 Comment

What I was looking for: create a dict from an ordinary List.
27

To add onto @fortran's answer, if you want to iterate over a list of keys key_list as well as a list of values value_list:

d = dict((key, value) for (key, value) in zip(key_list, value_list))

or

d = {key: value for (key, value) in zip(key_list, value_list)}

Comments

9

Just to throw in another example. Imagine you have the following list:

nums = [4,2,2,1,3]

and you want to turn it into a dict where the key is the index and value is the element in the list. You can do so with the following line of code:

{index:nums[index] for index in range(0,len(nums))}

1 Comment

The OP's question specified "For example, by iterating over pairs of keys and values", so most of the answers focus on that. However, I upvoted this because it is a good example for handling the list to dictionary use case.
8

This code will create dictionary using list comprehension for multiple lists with different values that can be used for pd.DataFrame()

#Multiple lists 
model=['A', 'B', 'C', 'D']
launched=[1983,1984,1984,1984]
discontinued=[1986, 1985, 1984, 1986]

#Dictionary with list comprehension
keys=['model','launched','discontinued']
vals=[model, launched,discontinued]
data = {key:vals[n] for n, key in enumerate(keys)}

#Convert dict to dataframe
df=pd.DataFrame(data)
display(df)

enumerate will pass n to vals to match each key with its list

Comments

7

Here is another example of dictionary creation using dict comprehension:

What i am tring to do here is to create a alphabet dictionary where each pair; is the english letter and its corresponding position in english alphabet

>>> import string
>>> dict1 = {value: (int(key) + 1) for key, value in 
enumerate(list(string.ascii_lowercase))}
>>> dict1
{'a': 1, 'c': 3, 'b': 2, 'e': 5, 'd': 4, 'g': 7, 'f': 6, 'i': 9, 'h': 8, 
'k': 11, 'j': 10, 'm': 13, 'l': 12, 'o': 15, 'n': 14, 'q': 17, 'p': 16, 's': 
19, 'r': 18, 'u': 21, 't': 20, 'w': 23, 'v': 22, 'y': 25, 'x': 24, 'z': 26}
>>> 

Notice the use of enumerate here to get a list of alphabets and their indexes in the list and swapping the alphabets and indices to generate the key value pair for dictionary

Hope it gives a good idea of dictionary comp to you and encourages you to use it more often to make your code compact

1 Comment

Nice answer - simplified: d = {k: v+1 for v, k in enumerate(string.ascii_lowercase)}
7

Adding to @Ekhtiar answer, if you want to make look up dict from list, you can use this:

names = ['a', 'b', 'd', 'f', 'c']
names_to_id = {v:k for k, v in enumerate(names)}
# {'a': 0, 'b': 1, 'c': 2, 'd': 3, 'f': 4}

Or in rare case that you want to filter duplicate, use set first (best in list of number):

names = ['a', 'b', 'd', 'f', 'd', 'c']
sorted_list = list(set(names))
sorted_list.sort()
names_to_id = {v:k for k, v in enumerate(sorted_list)}
# {'a': 0, 'b': 1, 'c': 2, 'd': 3, 'f': 4}

names = [1,2,5,5,6,2,1]
names_to_id = {v:k for k, v in enumerate(set(names))}
# {1: 0, 2: 1, 5: 2, 6: 3}

3 Comments

v:k in the first codeblock is misleading, it reads like value:key which is the wrong way around to create a dict. I'd suggest {name:index for index, name in enumerate(names)} as an improvement.
Also, you don't need the second part at all. Since it's a dict, it will by design remove duplicates by overwriting the entry.
@bjrne I preserve the original answer on that and I don't feel it misleading at all. Nope, the second part is to make lookup dict. If you not use set, the index will not in order. It's rare case and I also give the output, so just use if that is your use case.
6

Try this,

def get_dic_from_two_lists(keys, values):
    return { keys[i] : values[i] for i in range(len(keys)) }

Assume we have two lists country and capital

country = ['India', 'Pakistan', 'China']
capital = ['New Delhi', 'Islamabad', 'Beijing']

Then create dictionary from the two lists:

print get_dic_from_two_lists(country, capital)

The output is like this,

{'Pakistan': 'Islamabad', 'China': 'Beijing', 'India': 'New Delhi'}

1 Comment

you could have used zip
4
>>> {k: v**3 for (k, v) in zip(string.ascii_lowercase, range(26))}

Python supports dict comprehensions, which allow you to express the creation of dictionaries at runtime using a similarly concise syntax.

A dictionary comprehension takes the form {key: value for (key, value) in iterable}. This syntax was introduced in Python 3 and backported as far as Python 2.7, so you should be able to use it regardless of which version of Python you have installed.

A canonical example is taking two lists and creating a dictionary where the item at each position in the first list becomes a key and the item at the corresponding position in the second list becomes the value.

The zip function used inside this comprehension returns an iterator of tuples, where each element in the tuple is taken from the same position in each of the input iterables. In the example above, the returned iterator contains the tuples (“a”, 1), (“b”, 2), etc.

Output:

{'i': 512, 'e': 64, 'o': 2744, 'h': 343, 'l': 1331, 's': 5832, 'b': 1, 'w': 10648, 'c': 8, 'x': 12167, 'y': 13824, 't': 6859, 'p': 3375, 'd': 27, 'j': 729, 'a': 0, 'z': 15625, 'f': 125, 'q': 4096, 'u': 8000, 'n': 2197, 'm': 1728, 'r': 4913, 'k': 1000, 'g': 216, 'v': 9261}

Comments

1

Yes, it's possible. In python, Comprehension can be used in List, Set, Dictionary, etc. You can write it this way

mydict = {k:v for (k,v) in blah}

Another detailed example of Dictionary Comprehension with the Conditional Statement and Loop:

parents = [father, mother]
            
parents = {parent:1 - P["mutation"] if parent in two_genes else 0.5 if parent in one_gene else P["mutation"] for parent in parents}

Comments

0

You can create a new dict for each pair and merge it with the previous dict:

reduce(lambda p, q: {**p, **{q[0]: q[1]}}, bla bla bla, {})

Obviously this approaches requires reduce from functools.

1 Comment

same idea: reduce(lambda p, q: {**p, **dict([q])}, bla bla bla, {})
0

Assuming blah blah blah is a two-tuples list:

Let's see two methods:

# method 1
>>> lst = [('a', 2), ('b', 4), ('c', 6)]
>>> dict(lst)
{'a': 2, 'b': 4, 'c': 6}
# method 2
>>> lst = [('a', 2), ('b', 4), ('c', 6)]
>>> d = {k:v for k, v in lst}
>>> d
{'a': 2, 'b': 4, 'c': 6}

Comments

0

this approach uses iteration over the given date using a for loop.

Syntax: {key: value for (key, value) in data}

Eg:

# create a list comprehension with country and code:
    Country_code = [('China', 86), ('USA', 1),
            ('Ghana', 233), ('Uk', 44)]

# use iterable method to show results
{key: value for (key, value) in Country_code}

Comments

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.