An element in a dictionary is also called an item. Each item is made up of a key and a value.
The three dictionary methods; items(), keys() and values()retrieves all items, keys and values respectively.
items() – Returns an iterable of all key-value pairs(items) present in the dictionary.
keys() – Returns an iterable with all the keys in the dictionary.
values()- Returns an iterable with all the values in the dictionary.
items() – Get all items present in a dictionary
To get an iterable containing all the items present in a dictionary, use theitems()method. The syntax is as shown below:
d.items()
The method does not take any argument.
d = {
‘Spain’: ‘Madrid’,
‘Italy’: ‘Rome’,
‘France’: ‘paris’
}
#get the items
all_items = d.items()
print(all_items)
The items()method is useful when it comes to iterating over the dictionary items. Remember that iterating over a dictionary only yields its keys, so using the items()method allows you to access both the key and its corresponding value in one iteration.
iterating through a dictionary
d = {
‘Spain’: ‘Madrid’,
‘Italy’: ‘Rome’,
‘France’: ‘paris’
}
for i in d:
print(i)
In the above example, we used the for loop to iterate over a dictionary. As you can see, only the keys are returned. Now consider the same example with the items() method.
iterating over items()
d = {
‘Spain’: ‘Madrid’,
‘Italy’: ‘Rome’,
‘France’: ‘paris’
}
for i in d.items():
print(i)
As you can see, iterating through the items() object returns tuples in the form (key, value) for each dictionary item.
keys() – get all keys of a dictionary
Thekeys()method returns an object containing all the keys present in a dictionary.
it has the following syntax:
d.keys()
The method does not take any arguments.
d = {
‘Spain’: ‘Madrid’,
‘Italy’: ‘Rome’,
‘France’: ‘paris’
}
#get the keys
all_keys = d.keys()
print(all_keys)
print(type(all_keys))
You can iterate through the returned object to get individual keys at each iteration.
d = {
‘Spain’: ‘Madrid’,
‘Italy’: ‘Rome’,
‘France’: ‘paris’
}
#iterate through the keys
for k in d.keys():
print(k)
values() – get all values in the dictionary
Finally, the values() method returns an object containing all the keys in the dictionary. It has the following syntax:
d.values()
The method does not take arguments.
d = {
‘Spain’: ‘Madrid’,
‘Italy’: ‘Rome’,
‘France’: ‘paris’
}
#get the keys
all_values = d.values()
print(all_values)
print(type(all_values))
iterate through the values
d = {
‘Spain’: ‘Madrid’,
‘Italy’: ‘Rome’,
‘France’: ‘paris’
}
#iterate through the keys
for v in d.values():
print(v)
Conclusion
Use items()to get an iterable of two length tuples, where each tuple contains a key and a value of a dictionary item.
Use keys() to get an iterable of all the keys present in a dictionary.
use values() to get an iterable of all the values present in a dictionary.
Related articles
dict.update() method in Python
dict.fromkeys() method in Python
dict.popitem() method in Python
