Dictionary creation with fromkeys and mutable objects. A surprise [duplicate]

Solution 1:

Your Python 2.6 example is equivalent to the following, which may help to clarify:

>>> a = []
>>> xs = dict.fromkeys(range(2), a)

Each entry in the resulting dictionary will have a reference to the same object. The effects of mutating that object will be visible through every dict entry, as you've seen, because it's one object.

>>> xs[0] is a and xs[1] is a
True

Use a dict comprehension, or if you're stuck on Python 2.6 or older and you don't have dictionary comprehensions, you can get the dict comprehension behavior by using dict() with a generator expression:

xs = dict((i, []) for i in range(2))

Solution 2:

In the first version, you use the same empty list object as the value for both keys, so if you change one, you change the other, too.

Look at this:

>>> empty = []
>>> d = dict.fromkeys(range(2), empty)
>>> d
{0: [], 1: []}
>>> empty.append(1) # same as d[0].append(1) because d[0] references empty!
>>> d
{0: [1], 1: [1]}

In the second version, a new empty list object is created in every iteration of the dict comprehension, so both are independent from each other.

As to "why" fromkeys() works like that - well, it would be surprising if it didn't work like that. fromkeys(iterable, value) constructs a new dict with keys from iterable that all have the value value. If that value is a mutable object, and you change that object, what else could you reasonably expect to happen?