---
title: "python dict get"
description: "For an embarassingly long time, til today, I have been wrapping my dict gets with key errors in python. I'm sure I've read it in code a bunch of times, but..."
date: 2022-02-03
published: false
tags:
  - python
template: til
---


For an embarassingly long time, til today, I have been wrapping my dict
gets with key errors in python.  I'm sure I've read it in code a bunch
of times, but just brushed over why you would use get.  That is until I
read a bunch of PR's from my buddy Nic and notice that he never gets
things with brackets and always with `.get`.  This turns out so much
cleaner to create a default case than try except.


## Example

Lets consider this example for prices of supplies.  Here we set a variable of
prices as a dictionary of items and thier price.

```python
prices = {'pen': 1.2, 'pencil', 0.3, 'eraser', 2.3}
```

## Except KeyError

What I would always do is try to get the key, and if it failed on KeyError, I
would set the value (`paper_price` in this case) to a default value.

```python
try:
    paper_price = prices['paper']
except KeyError:
    paper_price = None
```

## .get

What I noticed Nic does is to use get.  This feels just so much cleaner that
it's a one liner and feels much easier to read and understand that if there is
no price for paper we set it to `None`.

```python
paper_price = prices.get('paper', None)
```

We can just as easily set the default to other values.  Let's consider sales
for instance.  If there is not a record for the sale of paper, it might be that
we sold 0 paper in the given dataset.

```python
paper_sales = sales.get('paper', 0)
```