Question

In [1]: test = {}

In [2]: test["apple"] = "green"

In [3]: test["banana"] = "yellow"

In [4]: test["orange"] = "orange"

In [5]: for fruit, colour in test:
   ....:     print(fruit)
   ....:     
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ValueError                                Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-32-8930fa4ae2ac> in <module>()
----> 1 for fruit, colour in test:
      2     print(fruit)
      3 

ValueError: too many values to unpack

What I want is to iterate over test and get the key and value together. If I just do a for item in test: I get the key only.

An example of the end goal would be:

for fruit, colour in test:
    print(f"The fruit {fruit} is the colour {colour}")

Answer 1

Use items() to get an iterable of (key, value) pairs from test:

for fruit, color in test.items():
    # do stuff

This is covered in the tutorial.

In Python 2, items returns a concrete list of such pairs; you could have used iteritems to get the same lazy iterable instead.

for fruit, color in test.iteritems():
    # do stuff