Question

Is it possible to create a dictionary comprehension in Python (for the keys)?

Without list comprehensions, you can use something like this:

l = []
for n in range(1, 11):
    l.append(n)

We can shorten this to a list comprehension: l = [n for n in range(1, 11)].

However, say I want to set a dictionary’s keys to the same value.
I can do:

d = {}
for n in range(1, 11):
     d[n] = True # same value for each

I’ve tried this:

d = {}
d[i for i in range(1, 11)] = True

However, I get a SyntaxError on the for.

In addition (I don’t need this part, but just wondering), can you set a dictionary’s keys to a bunch of different values, like this:

d = {}
for n in range(1, 11):
    d[n] = n

Is this possible with a dictionary comprehension?

d = {}
d[i for i in range(1, 11)] = [x for x in range(1, 11)]

This also raises a SyntaxError on the for.

Answer 1

There are dictionary comprehensions in Python 2.7+, but they don’t work quite the way you’re trying. Like a list comprehension, they create a new dictionary; you can’t use them to add keys to an existing dictionary. Also, you have to specify the keys and values, although of course you can specify a dummy value if you like.

>>> d = {n: n**2 for n in range(5)}
>>> print d
{0: 0, 1: 1, 2: 4, 3: 9, 4: 16}

If you want to set them all to True:

>>> d = {n: True for n in range(5)}
>>> print d
{0: True, 1: True, 2: True, 3: True, 4: True}

What you seem to be asking for is a way to set multiple keys at once on an existing dictionary. There’s no direct shortcut for that. You can either loop like you already showed, or you could use a dictionary comprehension to create a new dict with the new values, and then do oldDict.update(newDict) to merge the new values into the old dict.