Divide a dictionary into variables [duplicate]

Question

I am studying Python and currently going through some more learning with dictionaries.

I was wondering;

If I have a dictionary like: d = {'key_1': 'value_a', 'key_2': 'value_b'} and I want separate/divide this dictionary into variables where each variable is a key from the dictionary and each variables value is the value of that key in the dictionary.

What would be the best pythonic way to achieve this?

d = {'key_1': 'value_a', 'key_2': 'value_b'} #perform the command and get key_1 = 'value_a' key_2 = 'value_b' 

I tried: key_1, key_2 = d but it did not work.

Basically I am seeking expert's wisdom to find out if there is a better way to reduce 2 lines of code into one.

Note: This is not a dynamic variable creation.

Answer 1

The existing answers will work, but they're all essentially re-implementing a function that already exists in the Python standard library: operator.itemgetter()

From the docs:

Return a callable object that fetches item from its operand using the operand’s __getitem__() method. If multiple items are specified, returns a tuple of lookup values. For example:

After f = itemgetter(2), the call f(r) returns r[2].

After g = itemgetter(2, 5, 3), the call g(r) returns (r[2], r[5], r[3]).

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In other words, your destructured dict assignment becomes something like:

from operator import itemgetter  d = {'key_1': 'value_a', 'key_2': 'value_b'} key_1, key_2 = itemgetter('key_1', 'key_2')(d)  # prints "Key 1: value_a, Key 2: value_b" print("Key 1: {}, Key 2: {}".format(key_1, key_2)) 

Answer 2

Problem is that dicts are unordered, so you can't use simple unpacking of d.values(). You could of course first sort the dict by key, then unpack the values:

# Note: in python 3, items() functions as iteritems() did #       in older versions of Python; use it instead ds = sorted(d.iteritems()) name0, name1, name2..., namen = [v[1] for v in ds] 

You could also, at least within an object, do something like:

for k, v in dict.iteritems():     setattr(self, k, v) 

Additionally, as I mentioned in the comment above, if you can get all your logic that needs your unpacked dictionary as variables in to a function, you could do:

def func(**kwargs):     # Do stuff with labeled args  func(**d)