Making Lists of Dictionaries in Python is Easy and Useful

A list is a Python data type that can hold multiple items, which may be of different types. In particular, it can contain dictionaries. A dictionary is a key-value pair mapping, meaning each value is …

Updated October 28, 2023

Lists in Python are ordered collections of objects (any immutable object) like numbers or strings. They have the following properties:

An element can be accessed by an index.
List elements can be added/removed.
The order in which items are added to a list is preserved, so you can easily check if a particular item exists in the list using the in keyword.
Dictionaries are unordered collections of data values that are used to store data values like key-value pairs where each value is associated with a unique key.
Lists and dictionaries are mutable, meaning you can change their contents after they’re created.

In this tutorial, we will go over creating lists of dictionaries in Python. Here’s an example:

people = [{'name': 'John', 'age': 30}, {'name': 'Mike', 'age': 25}] # Creating a list of dictionaries
print(people[0]['name']) # Getting the name of the first person in our list
print(people[1]['age'])  # Getting the age of the second person in our list

In this example, we created a list with two dictionaries. The dictionary holds information about people. Each dictionary represents an individual person and contains ‘name’ and ‘age’ keys. We then printed out the first name from the first dictionary and the age from the second one to demonstrate accessing elements of our lists of dictionaries.

Remember, Python is an excellent language for handling complex data structures like lists of dictionaries, which can be especially useful when working with databases or other structured data sources. In addition, the flexibility of Python allows us to combine these data structures in a multitude of ways, allowing for complex and efficient solutions.