Dictionaries have a method called items that returns a sequence of tuples, where each tuple is a key-value pair.
>>> d = {'a':0, 'b':1, 'c':2} >>> t = d.items() >>> t dict_items([('c', 2), ('a', 0), ('b', 1)])
The result is a dict_items object, which is an iterator that iterates the key-value pairs. You can use it in a for loop like this:
>>> for key, value in d.items(): ... print(key, value) ... c 2 a 0
b 1
Going in the other direction, you can use a list of tuples to initialize a new dictionary:
>>> t = [('a', 0), ('c', 2), ('b', 1)] >>> d = dict(t) >>> d {'a': 0, 'c': 2, 'b': 1}
Combining dict with zip yields a concise way to create a dictionary:
>>> d = dict(zip('abc', range(3))) >>> d {'a': 0, 'c': 2, 'b': 1}