Question

I am studying Python and currently going through some more learning with dictionaries.

I was wondering;

If I have a dictionary like: d = {'key_1': 'value_a', 'key_2': 'value_b'} and I want separate/divide this dictionary into variables where each variable is a key from the dictionary and each variables value is the value of that key in the dictionary.

What would be the best pythonic way to achieve this?

d = {'key_1': 'value_a', 'key_2': 'value_b'}
#perform the command and get
key_1 = 'value_a'
key_2 = 'value_b'

I tried: key_1, key_2 = d but it did not work.

Basically I am seeking expert’s wisdom to find out if there is a better way to reduce 2 lines of code into one.

Note: This is not a dynamic variable creation.

Answer 1

Problem is that dicts are unordered, so you can’t use simple unpacking of d.values(). You could of course first sort the dict by key, then unpack the values:

# Note: in python 3, items() functions as iteritems() did
#       in older versions of Python; use it instead
ds = sorted(d.iteritems())
name0, name1, name2..., namen = [v[1] for v in ds]

You could also, at least within an object, do something like:

for k, v in dict.iteritems():
    setattr(self, k, v)

Additionally, as I mentioned in the comment above, if you can get all your logic that needs your unpacked dictionary as variables in to a function, you could do:

def func(**kwargs):
    # Do stuff with labeled args

func(**d)