How to convert list of key-value tuples into dictionary?
>>> dict([('A', 1), ('B', 2), ('C', 3)])
{'A': 1, 'C': 3, 'B': 2}
Your error:
Why you are getting the ValueError: dictionary update sequence element #0 has length 1916; 2 is required
error:
The answer is that the elements of your list are not what you think they are. If you type myList[0]
you will find that the first element of your list is not a two-tuple, e.g. ('A', 1)
, but rather a 1916-length iterable.
Once you actually have a list in the form you stated in your original question (myList = [('A',1),('B',2),...]
), all you need to do is dict(myList)
.
[2021 edit: now also answers the actual question asked, not the intended question about the specific error:]
In general:
Either use the usual dict(iterableOrMapping)
constructor, or use the dict comprehension {someExpr(k,v) for k:v in iterable}
syntax:
>>> example1 = [('A',1), ('B',2), ('C',3)]
>>> dict(example1)
{'A': 1, 'B': 2, 'C': 3}
>>> {x:x**2 for x in range(3)}
{0: 0, 1: 1, 2:4}
# inline; same as example 1 effectively. may be an iterable, such as
# a sequence, evaluated generator, generator expression
>>> dict( zip(range(2),range(2)) )
{0: 0, 1: 1, 2:2}
A Python dictionary is an O(1)-searchable unordered collection of pairs {(k
ey→v
alue), ...} where keys are any immutable objects and values are any object.
Keys MUST implement the .__eq__()
and .__hash__()
methods to be usable in the dictionary. If you are thinking of implementing this, you are likely doing something wrong and should maybe consider a different mapping data structure! (Though sometimes you can get away with wrapping the keys in a different wrapper structure and using a regular dict, this may not be ideal.)
Intermediate or advanced programmers who wish to implement a 'frozen' or 'immutable' type, or one which masquerades as one, must be very careful of implications or else your program will be wrong with extremely subtle and near-impossible-to-find bugs:
You can't use a dict if you allow yourself to mutate the object later such that its notion of equality might change. Objects considered equal must always have __eq__
return True and have __hash__
return identical values.
The methods must exactly obey the spec. This means that:
- For novices: Hash functions(wikip.) let you get a false-positive or true-positive result;
hash(x)==hash(y)
meansx
MIGHT equaly
and the internal python code must then checkx==y
(.__eq__
) to confirm it's a true-positive and not a false-positive. This allows O(1) lookup. - For novices: It is critically important that the
__hash__
value not change for any reason once the object is in its final state. If you cannot guarantee both this andhash(x)!=hash(y) implies x!=y
, you should not be using a dict. - One might consider a different type of mapping rather than modifying the data itself. This can be equivalent to writing a wrapper object, at the cost of using a library. This is usually not necessary.
- For experts: It should also be noted that the hashes of some default objects are salted and may change between python invocations and versions (this may be a gotcha if you store or network-communicate data in any way that contains python hashes; they are an internal detail that should be regenerated on each process startup).
Python has a bunch of built-in frozen datastructures such as namedtuple
, frozenset
, etc., but they are sometimes harder to work with. tuple
is the basic frozen variant of the basic list
structure (which would let you store a {(1, 2): 3, (4, 5): 6}
). It also has some variants of the dict
structure. If you want to get a map from "frozen dicts" to values, frozendict doesn't exist except as a third-party library, but you can extract the dict's .items()
as a an unordered frozenset
of tuple
s.