If Dict Contains a particular key

[John Nagle]

mensanator at aol.com wrote:
> On Apr 24, 1:41 pm, Steven Bethard <steven.beth... at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>Steven Howe wrote:
>>
>>>Carsten Haese wrote:
>>>
>>>>On Tue, 2007-04-24 at 18:28 +0100, Robert Rawlins - Think Blue wrote:
>>
>>>>>Hello Guys,
>>
>>>>>I'm Looking to build a quick if/else statement that checks a
>>>>>dictionary for a key like follows.

     It would be useful if there was some direct way to get the value
associated with a key, and None if there's not one.

     The basic options are

	if dict.has_key(key} :
	    value = dict[key]
	else :
	    value = None

or

	try:
	    value = dict[key]
	except:
	    value = None

one of which requires two lookups, and the other of which takes
you through the exception machinery.

This can be a bottleneck in some text processing applications.
But it's not a big deal.

				John Nagle