1) Is there any advantage to use the
y = a.keys() for z in y:
looping technique rather than the
for x in a:
looping technique?
2) What are the tradeoffs for using each of the techniques?
Calling dict.keys creates a list in memory of the keys to the dict. Using the dict directly in the for-loop (which implicitly calls __iter__) will only load one key into memory at a time. The only time you should call keys is if you *really* need a list. If you're just going to iterate over them in a for-loop, you should definitely use the latter technique.
STeVe -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
