Question

What’s the best way to initialize (e.g. before a loop) a dictionary that will contain strings and a list in each item?

For instance:

dict = [("string1", [1,2]), ("string2", [5,6]),..]

So:

dict["string1"]

returns:

[1,2]

Answer 1

Please don’t call a variable dict (or list, or set, etc) because it “covers up” existing functions and prevents you from using them.

data = {
    "string1": [1,2],
    "string2": [5,6]
}

print data["string1"]    # => [1,2]

If you’re a bit of a masochist, you can also try

data = dict([("string1",[1,2]), ("string2", [5,6])])

or (per cval’s example)

data = dict(zip(strings, numbers))