how to kill dictionary entry

[Jose' Sebrosa]

dsavitsk wrote:
> 
> i have a daemon process running that keeps track of connections to it in a
> dictionary.  when a client disconnects i set the dictionary value = None,
> but the key persists.  is there a way to get rid of it totally? for example,
> in the code below, i want a[1] and a[2] to throw the same error.
> 
> >>> a = {}
> >>> a[1] = None
> >>> print a[1]
> None
> >>> print a[2]
> Traceback (innermost last):
>   File "<interactive input>", line 1, in ?
> KeyError: 2

To remove the key 1 from the dict a, you want to do 
del a[1]

instead of 
a[1] = None

More: This gives you a KeyError if a as not 1 as key. To avoid that, you can do

if a.has_key(1):  del a[1]

Check that in the methods of dictionaries.

Sebrosa