Appending values to dictionary in Python

Question

I have a dictionary to which I want to append to each drug, a list of numbers. Like this:

append(0), append(1234), append(123), etc.  def make_drug_dictionary(data):     drug_dictionary={'MORPHINE':[],                      'OXYCODONE':[],                      'OXYMORPHONE':[],                      'METHADONE':[],                      'BUPRENORPHINE':[],                      'HYDROMORPHONE':[],                      'CODEINE':[],                      'HYDROCODONE':[]}     prev = None     for row in data:         if prev is None or prev==row[11]:             drug_dictionary.append[row[11][]     return drug_dictionary 

I later want to be able to access the entirr set of entries in, for example, 'MORPHINE'.

1. How do I append a number into the drug_dictionary?
2. How do I later traverse through each entry?

Answer 1

Just use append:

list1 = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] list2 = [123, 234, 456] d = {'a': [], 'b': []} d['a'].append(list1) d['a'].append(list2) print d['a'] 

Answer 2

You should use append to add to the list. But also here are few code tips:

I would use dict.setdefault or defaultdict to avoid having to specify the empty list in the dictionary definition.

If you use prev to to filter out duplicated values you can simplfy the code using groupby from itertools Your code with the amendments looks as follows:

import itertools def make_drug_dictionary(data):     drug_dictionary = {}     for key, row in itertools.groupby(data, lambda x: x[11]):         drug_dictionary.setdefault(key,[]).append(row[?])     return drug_dictionary 

If you don't know how groupby works just check this example:

>>> list(key for key, val in itertools.groupby('aaabbccddeefaa')) ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'a']