Question

How to create and append dictionary at the same time?

def buildList(theDict):
    array=[]
    for a,b in theDict.iteritems():
        array.append([a,b])

    return array
print buildList({"a": 1,"b": 2,"c": 3})

This prints out a list of lists. I want to print out a list of dictionaries without creating any new variables.

Answer 1

If I understand correctly what you want, this code should work.

def list_of_dicts(d):
    return [{key:value} for key, value in d.iteritems()]

print list_of_dicts({"a": 1,"b": 2,"c": 3})

list_of_dicts() uses a list comprehension, which creates a new dict with a single entry for each key/value pair in the passed-in dictionary.

Do you see how you could use a list comprehension to re-write your example, and return a list of lists? It would just require changing three characters in the above.

P.S. I used PEP 8 names (lower_case rather than camelCase).