This community-built FAQ covers the “Changing Your Mind” exercise in Codecademy’s lessons on Python.
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Hi! in the previous excercise I added dish-price pairs to the menu dictionary. When I wanted to set the ‘Rockhopper Penguin’ value to something else I used the exact same code as when I added new key pairs.
My question is, why does it change the existing pair instead of creating a new ‘Rockhopper Penguin’ pair, similar to what would happen in a list? Can I ever add two keys with the same name but different values in a dictionary?
Thanks in advance!
If you want a list of pairs use… a list… right?
Keys specify what you want, similar to an index in a list. Can you have two values at the same index? If you replace something then you are discarding the old thing.
Yes, but let’s say we create the list pets = [‘dog’, ‘cat’, ‘dog’]. We have ‘dog’ at index [0] and [2]. The same wouldn’t work for the dictionary pets = {‘dog’: 1, ‘cat’: 2, ‘dog’: 3} in my case. Maybe I can .append a ‘dog’ into the dictionary but I haven’t tried yet.
A dictionary isn’t a list, it doesn’t have an append operation. A dict is a key-value store, you can insert values at a key.
You’re using a key as a value so it’s not equivalent is it? You can have multiple values that are dog, nothing’s stopping you from that. The purpose of keys is to refer to a specific value.
If you have two identical street addresses then is that not the same address? You don’t have two, you have one.
If you expect something to behave a like a list… use a list.
[('dog', 1), ('cat', 2), ('dog', 3)]
Or if you want each key to be associated with multiple values, then, how do you represent multiple values? A list. In that case you do not have many dogs, you have a dog key, and a list of values
Is there a way to write a 1 liner code eg. del zoo_animals[’ ‘Sloth’ , ‘Bengal Tiger’] instead of writing 2 x del zoo_animals ? What if we want to delete many more animals ?