Tony Waddell wrote: > I am wondering how look for a key in a dictionary, given a value. > > I have a dictionary similar to this: > a = { 'a1':1, 'a2':2, 'a3':3, 'a4'.:4} > > If I have the value of 2, how would I look at the dictionary to turn > that into 'a2'.
You have to search the values. This will produce a list of all keys that have a given value (there could be zero, one or more): [ key for key, value in a if value==2 ] If you have to do this often you might consider keeping a reverse-lookup dictionary or perhaps your key-value relationship is backwards. You might be interested in these recipes: http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/415903 http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/252143 Kent _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor