Thank you both, the assigning using slicing works perfectly (as I'm sure you knew it would)... It just didn't occur to me because it seemed a little nonintuitive... The specific application was
def dicttolist (inputdict): finallist=[] for k, v in inputdict.iteritems(): temp = v temp.insert(0,k) finallist.append(temp) return finallist to convert a dictionary to a list. We deal with large amounts of bankdata which the dictionary is perfect for since loan number is a perfect key... at the end, though, I have to throw it into a csv file and the csv writer doesn't like dictionaries (since the key is an iterable string it iterates over each value in the key) by changing temp = v[:] the code worked perfectly (although changing temp.insert(0,k) to temp = [k] + temp also worked fine... I didn't like that as I knew it was a workaround) Thanks again for the help -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list