I often find myself wanting to accumulate all the values for a given key in a list. The mdict class provides a simple implementation of this feature.
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Copy to clipboard1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 | class mdict(dict):
def __setitem__(self, key, value):
"""add the given value to the list of values for this key"""
self.setdefault(key, []).append(value)
if __name__ == '__main__':
ml = mdict()
key = 'key'
ml[key] = 'val1'
ml[key] = 'val2'
print ml[key]
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mdict is a subclass of the built-in dictionary in which each key maps to a list of values. By overriding __setitem__, it changes the behavior of both the get method and the [ ] operator.
If d is a normal dictionary, then d[key]=value replaces the old value for the given key, if there is one.
If d is an mdict, then d[key]=value appends the new value onto the list of values for this key, creating a new list if necessary.
mdict inherits the constructor from dict. If the user initializes the mdict by passing arguments to the constructor, the value for each key-value pair must be list, or else subsequent __setitem__ invocations will fail. Alternatively, we could have overriden the constructor to check the types of the initial values and convert them appropriately, but it is not clear that there is a general solution.
Simply Using this Dict with List. I recently had similar requirements and used someting like below:
{'key': ['v1', 1]}