How to add items to a dictionary in Python

Overview

Dictionaries in Python are used to store information that comes in key-value pairs. A dictionary contains a key and its value.

Code example

For example, each country has its capital, and in this context, the different countries can be keys, whereas their respective capitals are their values.

Take a look at this code below:

Code explanation

We created a dictionary named countries, set “usa” as the key, and “washington” as the value.

Code output

{'usa': 'Washington'}

The code returned a dictionary, as expected.

Now, how do we dynamically add another item to a dictionary?

How to add an item to a dictionary

To add another country, for example, "Ghana", to the dictionary we created earlier, countries, we use a new index key and value.

Code example

Now, let’s add "Ghana" as the key, and "Accra" as the value to the dictionary.

Code explanation

• Line 1: We create the dictionary countries.
• Line 2: We add a new key and value to the dictionary by putting the value Ghana into a square bracket, and assigning Accra as the value.
• Line 3: We print the updated dictionary.

Similarly, we can add many other key:value pairs in our dictionary.