How To Give Dictionary As Input In Python

Giving a dictionary as input in Python is a very common and useful way to provide a structured collection of data elements consisting of key-value pairs.

The Python dictionary is a built-in fundamental data structure that allows you to store and access an information set, wherein, each item has a unique identifying key.

This tutorial will guide you through the process of giving a dictionary as input in Python step-by-step.

Step 1: Initialize an empty dictionary

First, let’s create an empty dictionary to later add elements to it.

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# Initialize an empty dictionary
my_dict = {}

Step 2: Accept key-value pairs from the user

Next, we define the number of key-value pairs to be added to the dictionary and then prompt the user to provide these pairs. We will be using a for loop to iterate through the process of collecting inputs and adding them to the dictionary.

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# Get the number of key-value pairs from the user
n = int(input("Enter the number of elements you want to add to the dictionary: "))
 
# Collect key-value pairs from the user
for i in range(n):
    key = input("Enter the key: ")
    value = input("Enter the value: ")
    my_dict[key] = value

Step 3: Display the dictionary

Finally, let’s display the resulting dictionary.

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print("The dictionary is:", my_dict)

Full Code

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# Initialize an empty dictionary
my_dict = {}
 
# Get the number of key-value pairs from the user
n = int(input("Enter the number of elements you want to add to the dictionary: "))
 
# Collect key-value pairs from the user
for i in range(n):
    key = input("Enter the key: ")
    value = input("Enter the value: ")
    my_dict[key] = value
 
# Display the dictionary
print("The dictionary is:", my_dict)

Example Output

Enter the number of elements you want to add to the dictionary: 3
Enter the key: name
Enter the value: John
Enter the key: age
Enter the value: 25
Enter the key: occupation
Enter the value: Developer
The dictionary is: {'name': 'John', 'age': '25', 'occupation': 'Developer'}

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we went through the process of giving a dictionary as input in Python. You can easily modify the code to suit your specific requirements by adding more validation or type casting when collecting the inputs from the user. The power of Python dictionaries makes it an invaluable tool for working with structured data, and now you know how to obtain them from user inputs.