How to get key from dictionary in Python?

General Discussions
1

How can I get a key from a dictionary directly in Python, without searching by its value?

I have a dictionary like this:

mydictionary = {'keyname': 'somevalue'}

And I want to print out the key name and value together, like this:

for current in mydictionary:
    result = mydictionary.(some_function_to_get_key_name)[current]
    print(result)
    # Output: "keyname"

I want to avoid using methods that search by value since they might return multiple keys if there are many entries. Also, I’ve seen the get(key[, default]) method, but it only returns the value of the key, not the key itself.

2

You can loop through the dictionary keys directly. This approach allows you to access both the key and the value.

mydictionary = {'keyname': 'somevalue'}
for key in mydictionary:
    print(key)  # This will print the key
    print(mydictionary[key])  # This will print the value

This method is straightforward and works well if you only need the key and its associated value.

3

The items() method returns key-value pairs as tuples. You can loop over these pairs to get both the key and the value.

mydictionary = {'keyname': 'somevalue'}
for key, value in mydictionary.items():
    print(key)  # This prints the key
    print(value)  # This prints the value

This method is useful when you want to iterate over the dictionary and print both keys and values at the same time.

4

If you want to extract just the first key from the dictionary, you can use the iter() function in combination with next(). This method avoids looping through the entire dictionary.

mydictionary = {'keyname': 'somevalue'}
first_key = next(iter(mydictionary))
print(first_key)  # Prints the first key from the dictionary
print(mydictionary[first_key])  # Prints the corresponding value

This is a concise way to retrieve the key directly when you need just the first one.