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How to use dictionaries in Python

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So let’s get into dictionaries and that’s gonna end the sub-series I guess of types, this is going to be the last type that we’re going to talk about. So let’s go ahead and open up a terminal here and jump into Python. Now the previous video when we created a list we used square brackets and we entered comma-separated values in there which became our list, however in order to create a dictionary we’re going to open up sand close curly brackets here. Now in a previous video I told you guys that we don’t use curly brackets in Python and that was a lie, and just so you know there’s going to be a few of those throughout this course, so keep your eyes open for them. What I meant to say, and just to clarify, you don’t wrap code blocks in curly brackets like you do in PHP and JavaScript. Instead the only use that Python has for curly brackets is to define a dictionary. So, rather than entering comma-separated values we’re going to enter comma for separated values but each one of those is going to be a key and a value, so let’s go ahead and create one. Let’s create a person so the name is going to be {“name”: “Nick”, “age”: is 27, “hobby”: “code”} and that becomes our dictionary. Now, again, you can…you can access, I had tried to do that the JavaScript way here which you put a dot and then the name of the key that you’re looking for, in Python you do it like this kind of like when you define an index number here. If you were to do this it wouldn’t be able to find it because it’s not a list but with an array we would have done that, in here we just type the name of the value we want. So name is going to print out “Nick” if we put in age that’s going to print out “27” and if we enter hobby that’s going to print out “code” and so that’s how to define a dictionary and how to retrieve certain values from the dictionary. This is also going to become a very useful later on once we get to, well once we get JSON itself because we are going to do a video on JSON, but also once we start once we start working with a lot of data some of it’s, some of it we’re going to explicitly convert into JSON data just so we can parse it like this because this is one of the easiest ways to parse data is using this form. So thanks for watching this video and I hope you guys enjoyed it. This ends the sub section of types and in the next video we’re going to be learning about variables.