On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 11:16 PM, Angela Yang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > I have a list of values for one key. How do I specify this data structure? > > First tried, > > collection = [] > collection['abby'].append('apprentice1') > collection['abby'].append('apprentice2') > > That did not work because list index is not numeric. > But for dictionaries, it is key - value pairs. But I need key -> multiple > values.
A dict or defaultdict with list values would work well here. The defaultdict has the advantage of not requiring any user code to handle missing keys: In [7]: from collections import defaultdict In [8]: c=defaultdict(list) In [9]: c['abby'].append('apprentice1') In [10]: c['abby'].append('apprentice2') In [11]: c Out[11]: defaultdict(<type 'list'>, {'abby': ['apprentice1', 'apprentice2']}) Kent _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor