Creating and looping through dictionaries

You'll often encounter the need to loop over some array type data, like in Chapter 1, and provide it some structure so you can find the data you desire quickly.

You start that by creating an empty dictionary and assigning part of your array data as the key and the rest as the value.

Previously, you used sorted() to organize your data in a list. Dictionaries can also be sorted. By default, using sorted() on a dictionary will sort by the keys of the dictionary. You can also reverse the order by passing reverse=True as a keyword argument.

Finally, since sorted returns a list, you can use slice notation to select only part of the list. For example, [:10] will slice the first ten items off a list and return only those items.

Create an empty dictionary called names_by_rank.
Loop over female_baby_names_2012.items(), unpacking it into the variables rank and name.
Inside the loop, add each name to the names_by_rank dictionary using the rank as the key.
Sort the names_by_rank dictionary keys in descending order, select the first ten items. Print each item.

Exercise

Creating and looping through dictionaries

Instructions