finding a component in a list of pairs

[Peter Pearson]

[snip]
> print( dict( pairs ).get( 'sun', '(unknown)' ))

You probably know this, but . . . just in case . . .

If you're doing this many times, you'll want to construct the dict
just once and then make many references to the dict, rather than
re-constructing the dict every time you want to look up an element.

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