Apr 6, 2013

Updating the key name in a Python dictionary

This is going to be a short text just to remind me how to modify quickly the name of a key in a Python dictionary. It is straightforward operation that I would like to comment. The idea consists in popping the key and its value, and then, putting it into the dictionary again with a new name.

Let's see an example. The following dictionary has a couple of keys, protocol and size, and I want to change the "protocol" key to "inet_protocol", and in addition, preserve its content.

>>> my_dict = {"protocol": "HTTP", "size": 1024}
>>> my_dict["inet_protocol"] = my_dict.pop("protocol")
>>>
>>> print my_dict
{'inet_protocol': 'HTTP', 'size': 1024}


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