Iterating over dictionaries using for loops

Question

I am a bit puzzled by the following code:

d = {'x': 1, 'y': 2, 'z': 3} 
for key in d:
    print key, 'corresponds to', d[key]

What I don't understand is the key portion. How does Python recognize that it needs only to read the key from the dictionary? Is key a special word in Python? Or is it simply a variable?

Answer 1

key is just a variable name.

for key in d:
will simply loop over the keys in the dictionary, rather than the keys and values. To loop over both key and value you can use the following:

For Python 2.x:

for key, value in d.iteritems():
For Python 3.x:

for key, value in d.items():