Question

This is the second time I’ve implemented something like this and I suspect there has to be a better (read: more pythonic) way to do this:

phone_book = {}

def add_number(name,number):
  if name in phone_book:
    phone_book['name'].append(number)
  else:
    phone_book['name'] = [number]

I realize the code can likely be made more concise with conditional assignments, but I suspect there’s likely a better way to go about this. I’m not interested in only making the code shorter.

Answer 1

Use dict‘s setdefault like this:

phone_book.setdefault('name', []).append(number)