Managing Structured Data with Dictionaries

A dictionary is a data structure that efficiently manages and retrieves data by storing it as pairs of keys and values.

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dictionary = {
    "key1": "value1",
    "key2": "value2",
    "key3": "value3",
}

For example, you can define a dictionary to store a person's information as follows:

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person = {
    "name": "John",
    "age": 30,
    "job": "Developer"
}

In the code above, the person dictionary contains keys like name, age, and job, with their corresponding values.

Dictionaries have the following features:

1. Fast Lookup: Dictionaries store data as key-value pairs, allowing very fast retrieval of values by their keys.

2. No Index-based Access: Dictionaries are unordered data structures, so you cannot access elements using an index as you can with lists or tuples.

3. Unique Keys: Each key in a dictionary must be unique; duplicate keys are not allowed within the same dictionary.

Dictionaries are defined using curly braces {}, with keys and values connected by a colon :.

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# Declaring an empty dictionary
empty_dict = {}

# Declaring a dictionary with key-value pairs
product = {
    "name": "Orange",
    "price": 1000,
    "best_before": "2024-12-31"
}