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Date: Fri, 3 Jan 2014 19:15:26 -0500
Subject: Re: Creating a list with holes
From: Larry Martell <larry.martell@gmail.com>
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On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 1:07 PM, Denis McMahon <denismfmcmahon@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 03 Jan 2014 10:41:21 -0500, Larry Martell wrote:
>
>> The holes would be between the items I put in. In my example above, if I
>> assigned to [10] and [20], then the other items ([0..9] and [11..19])
>> would have None.
>
>>>> dic = { 10:6, 20:11}
>>>> dic.get(10)
> 6
>>>> dic.get(14)
>>>> dic.get(27,"oh god there's nothing here")
> "oh god there's nothing here"
>>>> dic.get(99,None)
>>>> dic.get(168,False)
> False
>>>> dic.get(20,"Boo Yah")
> 11
>>>>
>
> So a standard dictionary does this returning None (or any other default
> value you care to pass it) as long as you use the dict.get(key[,default])
> method rather than dict[key] to return the value.
>
> See also:
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6130768/return-none-if-dictionary-key-
> is-not-available

Thanks, but I know all that about dicts. I need to use a list for
compatibility with existing code.