Initializing a dictionary in python with a key value and no corresponding values

I was wondering if there was a way to initialize a dictionary in python with keys but no corresponding values until I set them. Such as:

Definition = {'apple': , 'ball': }

and then later i can set them:

Definition[key] = something

I only want to initialize keys but I don't know the corresponding values until I have to set them later. Basically I know what keys I want to add the values as they are found. Thanks.

Use the fromkeys function to initialize a dictionary with any default value. In your case, you will initialize with None since you don't have a default value in mind.

empty_dict = dict.fromkeys(['apple','ball'])

this will initialize empty_dict as:

empty_dict = {'apple': None, 'ball': None}

As an alternative, if you wanted to initialize the dictionary with some default value other than None, you can do:

default_value = 'xyz'
nonempty_dict = dict.fromkeys(['apple','ball'],default_value)

You could initialize them to None.

you could use a defaultdict. It will let you set dictionary values without worrying if the key already exists. If you access a key that has not been initialized yet it will return a value you specify (in the below example it will return None)

from collections import defaultdict
your_dict = defaultdict(lambda : None)

It would be good to know what your purpose is, why you want to initialize the keys in the first place. I am not sure you need to do that at all.

1) If you want to count the number of occurrences of keys, you can just do:

Definition = {}
# ...
Definition[key] = Definition.get(key, 0) + 1

2) If you want to get None (or some other value) later for keys that you did not encounter, again you can just use the get() method:

Definition.get(key)  # returns None if key not stored
Definition.get(key, default_other_than_none)

3) For all other purposes, you can just use a list of the expected keys, and check if the keys found later match those.

For example, if you only want to store values for those keys:

expected_keys = ['apple', 'banana']
# ...
if key_found in expected_keys:
    Definition[key_found] = value

Or if you want to make sure all expected keys were found:

assert(all(key in Definition for key in expected_keys))

You can initialize the values as empty strings and fill them in later as they are found.

dictionary = {'one':'','two':''}
dictionary['one']=1
dictionary['two']=2