deconstructing and reconstructing python dictionary

Question

I have a dictionary which I need to deconstruct its keys and values in perhaps two lists(or any other type that does the job) and later in another function, construct the exact same dictionary putting back the keys and values. What's the right way of approaching this?

Answer 1

You can use dict.items() to get all the key-value pairs from the dictionary, then either store them directly...

>>> d = {"foo": 42, "bar": 23}
>>> items = list(d.items())
>>> dict(items)
{'bar': 23, 'foo': 42}

... or distribute them to two separate lists, using zip:

>>> keys, values = zip(*d.items())
>>> dict(zip(keys, values))
{'bar': 23, 'foo': 42}