Question

I’m a beginner to Python, but I’ve been trying this syntax and I cannot figure it out — which was been really baffling.

crucial = {'eggs': '','ham': '','cheese': ''}
dishes = {'eggs': 2, 'sausage': 1, 'bacon': 1, 'spam': 500}

if crucial.keys() in dishes.keys():
    print dishes[value]

What I want to do is — if crucial has a key (in this case, eggs) in the dishes, it will return 2. It seems simple enough, but I believe I must be messing some type of syntax somewhere. If someone could guide me a little, that would be greatly appreciated.

The real dictionaries I’m comparing with is about 150 keys long, but I’m hoping this code is simple enough.

Answer 1

You need to iterate over the keys in crucial and compare each one against the dishes keys. So a directly modified version of your code.

for key in crucial.keys():
    if key in dishes.keys():
        print(dishes[key])

It could be better stated as (no need to specify .keys):

for key in crucial:
    if key in dishes:
        print(dishes[key])