In python, Dictionary is an unordered collection of data values, i.e., key: value pair within the curly braces. The keys in the dictionary are unique (can’t be repeated), whereas values can be duplicated. Questions on Dictionary are often asked in interviews due to its massive use during projects.

Therefore, having a piece of good knowledge about dictionary for every Data Scientist aspirant.

In this article, some critical theoretical as well as practical questions will be discussed, which will help aspirants have a good understanding of the Dictionary.

👁 Dictionary in python

Interview Questions on Dictionary

Question 1: What is a dictionary?

Dictionary is a set of key: value pairs, with each pair being unique. The dictionary can be created by using empty braces {}. We can add a key: value pair to it.

eg- dictionary1 = { ‘a’: 1, ‘b’: 2, ‘c’: 3 }

Question 2: Are dictionaries case-sensitive?

Yes, dictionaries are case-sensitive, i.e., the same name of keys, but different cases are treated differently, i.e., ‘apple’ and ‘APPLE’ will be treated as separate keys.

Question 3: What are different ways of creating a Dictionary?

Three different ways of creating a Dictionary are:

1. Create an empty Dictionary

Dictionary1 = {}
print(Dictionary1)

Output:

{}

key1 = 'a'
value1 = 1
Dictionary1[key1] = value1

Output:

{'a': 1}

2. Create Dictionary using dict() method

Dictionary1 = dict({1: 'a', 2: 'b'})
print(Dictionary1)

Output:

{1: 'a', 2: 'b'}

3. Create Dictionary with each item as Pair

Dictionary1 = dict([(1,'a'), (2, 'b')])
print(Dictionary1)

Output:

{1: 'a', 2: 'b'}

4. Creating Dictionary directly

Dictionary1 = {1: 'a', 2: 'b'}

Output:

{1: 'a', 2: 'b'}

Question 4: What is a Nested Dictionary? How is it created?

A dictionary inside the dictionary is known as a “Nested Dictionary”. For ex-

dictionary1 = {1: {'roll': '101', 'name': 'sam'},
                          2: {'roll': '102', 'name': 'ram'}}
print(dictionary1)

Output

{1: {'roll': '101', 'name': 'sam'}, 2: {'roll': '102', 'name': 'ram'}}

The elements of nested dictionary can be accessed using

print(dictionary[1]['roll'])

Output:

Question 5: How do you add an element in Dictionary?

Elements in a Dictionary can be added in multiple ways:

1. Adding one pair at a time

Dict1 ={}
Dict1[0] = 'a'
Dict1[1] = 'b'
print("Dictionary after adding 3 elements: ", Dict1)

Output:

{0: 'a', 1: 'b' }

2. Adding more than one value to a single key

Dict1['values'] = 4, 5, 6
print("Dictionary after adding multiple values to a key: ", Dict1)

Output:

{0: 'a', 1: 'b', 'values': (4, 5, 6) }

3. Adding nested key-value pair

Dict1['Nested'] = {1: 'Analytics', 2: 'Life'}

Output:

{0: 'a', 1: 'b', 'values': (4, 5, 6), 'Nested': {1: 'Analytics', 2: 'Life'} }

Question 6: Discuss different methods used with Dictionary.

Various methods used with Dictionary are:

1. clear()

It is used to delete all elements from a dictionary i.e., to create empty dictionary.

dict2 = {1: 'Analytics', 2: 'Vidhya'}
dict2.clear()
print(dict2)

Output:

{ }

2. get()

It is used to get the value of the specified key.

x = dict2.get(2)
print(x)

Output:

Vidhya

3. copy()

It is used to return copy of a dictionary

dict3 = dict2.copy()
print(dict3)

Output:

{1: 'Analytics', 2: 'Vidhya'}

4. items()

It is used to return a list tuples consisting of key-value pairs.

Dict1 = {1: 'Analytics', 2: 'Vidhya'}
print(Dict1.items())

Output:

dict_items([(1, 'Analytics'), (2, 'Vidhya')])

5. keys() and values()

Returns all keys and values within a dictionary respectively.

Dict1.key()
Dict1.values()

Output:

dict_keys([1, 2]) 
dict_values(['Analytics', 'Vidhya'])

6. update()

This method updated value of a key in dictionary

Dict1.update({2:"Blogathon"})
print(Dict1)

Output:

{1: 'Analytics', 2: 'Blogathon'}

Question 7: Create a dictionary from a given list. For instance-

Input : [1, ‘a’, 2, ‘b’, 3, ‘c’] Output : {1: ‘a’, 2: ‘b’, 3: ‘c’}

def Convert_list_dict(dict2):

x = iter(dict2)

res_dct1 = dict(zip(x, x))

return res_dct1

dict1 = [1, ‘a’, 2, ‘b’,3, ‘c’]

print(Convert_list_dict(dict1))

Here, zip() function takes iterables (it can be more than two also) and combines them in a tuple.

Output:

{1: 'a', 2: 'b', 3: 'c'}

Question 8: Create a list of tuples from the dictionary

The list of tuples can be created in following way:

dict1 = { 1: 'a', 2: 'b', 3: 'c' }
lst1 = list(dict1.items())
print(lst1)

Output:

[(1, 'a'), (2, 'b'), (3, 'c')]

Question 9: Create a list from the dictionary.

Suppose the given dictionary is:

dict1 = { 1: 'a', 2: 'b', 3: 'c' }

A list can be created using the below code:

x = list(dict1.keys())
y = list(dict1.values())
for i in y:
      x.append(i)
print(x)

Output:

[1, 2, 3, 'a', 'b', 'c']

Question 10: How can you delete key-value pair from Dictionary?

Key-value pair can be deleted by using ‘del’ keyword as shown below:

del dict1[1]
print(dict1)

Output:

{2: 'b', 3: 'c' }

Question 11: Is the dictionary mutable?

The term ‘Mutable’ means we can add, remove or update key-value pairs in a dictionary.

Yes, the dictionary is mutable. For instance,

Dict1 = {1: 'a', 2: 'b', 3: 'c', 4: 'd' }
Dict1[2] = 'h'
print(Dict2)

Output:

{1: 'a', 2: 'h', 3: 'c', 4: 'd' }

Question 12: Given two lists, create a dictionary from them.

Input: [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5], [‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, ‘d’, ‘e’]

Output: {1: ‘a’, 2: ‘b’, 3: ‘c’, 4: ‘d’, 5: ‘e’}

Let’s define these two lists as list1 and list2 as follows:

list1 = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
list2 = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e']
dict1 = {}
for i, j in zip(list1, list2):
 dict1[i] = j
print(dict1)

Output:

{1: 'a', 2: 'b', 3: 'c', 4: 'd', 5: 'e'}

Another way of achieving the same output:

dict1 = {i:h for i,j in zip(list1, list2)}
print(dict1)

Output:

{1: 'a', 2: 'b', 3: 'c', 4: 'd', 5: 'e'}

Question 13: Write a code to sort dictionaries using a key.

Input: {2: ‘Apple’, 1:’Mango’, 3:’Orange’, 4:’Banana’}

Output: 1: Mango
2: Apple
3: Orange
4: Banana

Below is the code to sort dictionaries using the key:

dict1 = {2: 'Apple', 1:'Mango', 3:'Orange', 4:'Banana'}
print(sorted(dict1.keys()))
for key in sorted(dict1):
      print("Sorted dictionary using key:",(key, color_dict[key]))

Output:

[1, 2, 3, 4] 
1: Mango
2: Apple
3: Orange
4: Banana

Conclusion

In this blog, we studied some of the important and frequently asked interview questions on Dictionary. To sum up, the following are the major contributions of the article:

1. Basic concepts of the Dictionary have been discussed to make the reader familiar with it.

2. We learned how to perform various functions on Dictionary, such as adding key-value pairs and deleting key-value pairs.

3. We discussed various functions that can be used to work and play with Dictionary.

4. Further, we also discussed several programming questions on Dictionary that can be asked in interviews.

The media shown in this article is not owned by Analytics Vidhya and is used at the Author’s discretion.

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