Newbie question on dictionary!!!

[Jeff Shannon]

Balaji wrote:

>Hello everybody...
>
>I want to ask a simple question.
>
>Suppose I have an list say g=['a','b','c','d']
>
>and I have an dictionary say k={'b':20,'a':10}
>
>Now I want to sort this dictionary on the basis of the list and if it
>doesnt find any of the element in the list then I wud like to replace
>it with zero..
>
>so I would like to modify k into {'a':10,'b':20,'c':0,'d':0}
>  
>

Dictionaries don't maintain any particular sort order.  (Or, 
technically, dictionaries are by definition sorted by the result of 
hash(value), which may not bear any resemblance to the sort order of 
value.)  So, we can't get your dictionary sorted the way you want, but 
we *can* fill in the undefined keys.

You want to use the dictionary method get().  It will return the value 
of a key, or a specified default value if that key isn't found.  You can 
then assign the result of that back into the dictionary under the same key.

for key in g:
    k[key] = k.get(key, 0)

Jeff Shannon
Technician/Programmer
Credit International