Dictionary Methods – get

In one of my previous articles we were talking about the pop and popitem dictionary methods. Today we’ll be talking about the get method.

Here’s the video version of the article:

The method get(key) may be used to access the value corresponding to key. It works like the [] operator if the key is found. Let’s define a dictionary:

>>> locations = {"Mexico" : "North America", "Chile" : "South America", "Estonia" : "Europe", "China" : "Asia"}

First let’s access one of its elements using square brackets:

>>> locations["Chile"]
'South America'

The same can be achieved by means of the get method:

>>> locations.get("Chile")
'South America'

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If the key is not found, the [] operator raises an error whereas get returns None:

>>> locations["Peru"]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
KeyError: 'Peru'

>>> locations.get("Peru")
>>> print(locations.get("Peru"))
None

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Default Value

There is also a version with 2 parameters: get(key, value). We can use it to set a default value, which will be returned, if the key is not found.

>>> locations.get("Peru", "South America")
'South America'

If the key is found, the method get(key, value) will not return the value from the parameter, but the one from the dictionary:

>>> locations.get("Estonia", "North America")
'Europe' 

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