Python: Iterate over Dictionary with List Values

Dictionaries are the implementation by Python of a data structure associative array. A dictionary is a collection of pairs of key values. A key pair and its associated value represent each key pair.

The list of key value pairs in curly braces that is separated by comma defines a dictionary. Column ‘:’ separates the value of each key.

A dictionary cannot be sorted only to get a representation of the sorted dictionary. Inherently, dictionaries are orderless, but not other types, including lists and tuples. Therefore, you need an ordered data type, which is a list—probably a list of tuples.

Given a dictionary with the values as list, the task is to iterate over the dictionary and print it.

Examples:

Input:

dictionary = {
'hello': [110, 200, 300],
'this': [3, 4, 5],
'is': 10,
'BTechGeeks': [1, 2, 3, 'python']
}

Output:

hello : 110 200 300 
this : 3 4 5 
is : 10 
BTechGeeks : 1 2 3 python

Traverse the dictionary with list values

We can traverse the dictionary by many ways two of them are

Using nested for loop and exceptional handling
Using List comprehension

Method #1:Using nested for loop and exceptional handling

Approach:

Iterate over the keys of dictionary.
Now using nested for loop iterate over the values of keys.
If a key has only one value, we get an error, so handle those errors with exceptional handling in Python by printing the key’s single value.

Below is the implementation:

# given dictionary
dictionary = {
    'hello': [110, 200, 300],
    'this': [3, 4, 5],
    'is': 10,
    'BTechGeeks': [1, 2, 3, 'python']
}
# iterate through dictionary
for key in dictionary:
    print(key, end=" : ")
    try:
        for value in dictionary[key]:
            print(value, end=" ")
    except:
        print(dictionary[key], end=" ")
    print()

Output:

hello : 110 200 300 
this : 3 4 5 
is : 10 
BTechGeeks : 1 2 3 python

Method #2:Using List comprehension

In the preceding example, we iterated through all of the list values for each key. However, if you want a complete list of pairs, we can also use list comprehension. Because a key in our dictionary can have multiple values, for each pair we will generate a list of pairs where the key is the same but the value is different.

Below is the implementation:

# given dictionary
dictionary = {
    'hello': [110, 200, 300],
    'this': [3, 4, 5],
    'is': [2, 10, 45],
    'BTechGeeks': [1, 2, 3, 'python']
}
# using list comprehension
keyvaluepairs = [(key, value)
                 for key, values in dictionary.items()
                 for value in values]
# traverse and print key  value pairs
for i in keyvaluepairs:
    print(i)

Output:

('hello', 110)
('hello', 200)
('hello', 300)
('this', 3)
('this', 4)
('this', 5)
('is', 2)
('is', 10)
('is', 45)
('BTechGeeks', 1)
('BTechGeeks', 2)
('BTechGeeks', 3)
('BTechGeeks', 'python')

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