Question

If I have a dictionary that looks like:

{'first': [
   {'red': ['six', 'three', 'seven', 'six']},
   {'green': ['eight', 'three', 'four']}
 ],
 'second': [
   {'blue': ['one', 'five', 'three']}
 ]
}

How can I get to specific points in the dictionary? For example, how can I print out the second ‘six’ in the ‘first’ header under subheading ‘red’?

Answer 1

Assuming your dictionary is called d you could do this:

print(d['first'][0]['red'][3])

• The expression d['first'] gives you the value associated with the key 'first'. The value is a list.
• The [0] gives you the first element in the list (by the way, why do you have a list containing only one element?). Note that indexing is 0-based in Python.
• Then you have another dictionary whose values are again lists. The ['red'] fetches the value from this dictionary.
• The [3] accesses the fourth element in the list.