Dictionaries lab

Introduction

In this lesson, we'll use our knowledge of dictionaries to retrieve data about various cities.

Objectives

• Practice retreiving information from dictionaries
• Practice assigning new information to dictionaries
• Practice retriving information from a list of dictionaries

Working with a single dictionary

Here is a dictionary representing the city of Greenville, North Carolina. The area is in kilometers squared.

greenville = {'Area': 68, 'City': 'Greenville', 'Country': 'USA', 'Population': 84554}

Remember to press shift + enter to run the code.

Let's retrieve the population of the city and assign it to the variable greenville_population.

greenville_population = None # change None
greenville_population # 84554

Now retrieve the area of Greenville and assign it to the variable area.

area = None
area # 68

Now let's take a look at all of the keys in the greenville dictionary and coerce them into a list. Assign this variable to the list city_keys.

city_keys = None
city_keys # ['Area', 'City', 'Country', 'Population']

Alright, next let's get all of the values in our greenville dictionary and coerce it into a list. Assign that list to the variable city_values.

city_values = None
city_values # [68, 'Greenville', 'USA', 84554]

Working with multiple cities

Once again, we can retrieve our data from a Google Sheet of Travel Cities and Countries shown here.

We already followed the steps of the previous lesson to download the spreadsheet and move it to the current folder. You can find the file in the github repository. So next, we get this data into Python code. We have written the code for reading excel into Python for you.

import pandas
file_name = './cities.xlsx'
travel_df = pandas.read_excel(file_name)
cities = travel_df.to_dict('records')

Remember to press shift + enter.

Cool. We have them!

cities

[{'City': 'Solta', 'Country': 'Croatia', 'Population': 1700, 'Area': 59},
 {'City': 'Greenville', 'Country': 'USA', 'Population': 84554, 'Area': 68},
 {'City': 'Buenos Aires',
  'Country': 'Argentina',
  'Population': 13591863,
  'Area': 4758},
 {'City': 'Los Cabos',
  'Country': 'Mexico',
  'Population': 287651,
  'Area': 3750},
 {'City': 'Walla Walla Valley',
  'Country': 'USA',
  'Population': 32237,
  'Area': 33},
 {'City': 'Marakesh', 'Country': 'Morocco', 'Population': 928850, 'Area': 200},
 {'City': 'Albuquerque',
  'Country': 'New Mexico',
  'Population': 559277,
  'Area': 491},
 {'City': 'Archipelago Sea',
  'Country': 'Finland',
  'Population': 60000,
  'Area': 8300},
 {'City': 'Iguazu Falls',
  'Country': 'Argentina',
  'Population': 0,
  'Area': 672},
 {'City': 'Salina Island', 'Country': 'Italy', 'Population': 4000, 'Area': 27},
 {'City': 'Toronto', 'Country': 'Canada', 'Population': 630, 'Area': 2731571},
 {'City': 'Pyeongchang',
  'Country': 'South Korea',
  'Population': 2581000,
  'Area': 3194}]

Ok, so the list of countries associated with each city has been assigned to the variable cities. Now we will work with reading and manipulating this list of cities.

Working with our list of cities

First, access the third to last element and set it equal to the variable salina.

salina = None 
salina
# {'Area': 27, 'City': 'Salina Island', 'Country': 'Italy', 'Population': 4000}

Now access the fourth country in the list, and set it's population equal to a variable called los_cabos_pop.

los_cabos_pop = None
los_cabos_pop # 287651

Now calculate the number of cities in the list and assign the number to the variabale city_count.

city_count = None
city_count # 12

Finally, change the spelling of the South Korean city, Pyeongchang, to the string 'PyeongChang', its alternative spelling.

cities[11]['City'] # 'PyeongChang'

Now let's work on retrieving a collection of information about a dictionary. Use the appropriate dictionary function to return a list of values in the dictionary regarding Pyeongchang. Assign the list to the variable pyeongchang_values.

pyeongchang_values = None

pyeongchang_values # ['PyeongChang', 'South Korea', 2581000, 3194]
type(pyeongchang_values) # list

NoneType

And now set pyeongchang_keys equal to a list of keys in the dictionary regarding Pyeongchang.

pyeongchang_keys = None


pyeongchang_keys # ['City', 'Country', 'Population', 'Area']
type(pyeongchang_keys) # list

NoneType

Summary

In this section we saw how to retrieve and alter data in a dictionary. We saw how we can retrieve a collection of information about a dictionary, like a list of it's keys and values, and we saw how to work with a list of dictionaries.