How to delete items from a dictionary while iterating over it

Question

Is it legitimate to delete items from a dictionary in Python while iterating over it?

For example:

for k, v in mydict.iteritems():
   if k == val:
     del mydict[k]

The idea is to remove elements that don't meet a certain condition from the dictionary, instead of creating a new dictionary that's a subset of the one being iterated over.

Is this a good solution? Are there more elegant/efficient ways?

Answer 1

Hii Kartik,

You could do it in two steps:

remove = [k for k in mydict if k == val]
for k in remove: del mydict[k]

My favorite approach is usually to just make a new dict:

# Python 2.7 and 3.x
mydict = { k:v for k,v in mydict.items() if k!=val }
# before Python 2.7
mydict = dict((k,v) for k,v in mydict.iteritems() if k!=val)

Thank You!!