Question

is it possible to do things like this:

def f():
  d={}
  d[1]='qwe'
  d[2]='rty'
  return d

a,b=f()[1:2]

not a,b=f()[1],f()[2]
and not

t=f()
a,b=t[1],t[2]

I wont avoid extra lines and call function only once.

Answer 1

No; dictionary indexing doesn’t support slicing, since it usually doesn’t make any sense in dictionary keys.

You can roll it yourself, though, with something like

a, b = map(f().get, [1, 2])

or (thanks @DSM)

a, b = operator.itemgetter(1, 2)(f())

These are slightly different in that if the result of f() is missing 1 or 2 as keys, the first will default to assigning None and the second will raise KeyError. map(f().__getitem__, ...) should be equivalent to itemgetter, though probably slightly slower.