Appending to list in Python dictionary

Question

Is there a more elegant way to write this code?

What I am doing: I have keys and dates. There can be a number of dates assigned to a key and so I am creating a dictionary of lists of dates to represent this. The following code works fine, but I was hoping for a more elegant and Pythonic method.

dates_dict = dict() 
for key,  date in cur:
    if key in dates_dict:
        dates_dict[key].append(date)
    else:
        dates_dict[key] = [date] 

I was expecting the below to work, but I keep getting a NoneType has no attribute append error.

dates_dict = dict() 
for key,  date in cur:
    dates_dict[key] = dates_dict.get(key, []).append(date) 

This probably has something to do with the fact that

print([].append(1)) 
None 

but why?

Answer 1

list.append returns None, since it is an in-place operation and you are assigning it back to dates_dict[key]. So, the next time when you do dates_dict.get(key, []).append you are actually doing None.append. That is why it is failing. Instead, you can simply do

dates_dict.setdefault(key, []).append(date)

But, we have collections.defaultdict for this purpose only. You can do something like this

from collections import defaultdict
dates_dict = defaultdict(list)
for key, date in cur:
    dates_dict[key].append(date)

This will create a new list object, if the key is not found in the dictionary.

Note: Since the defaultdict will create a new list if the key is not found in the dictionary, this will have unintented side-effects. For example, if you simply want to retrieve a value for the key, which is not there, it will create a new list and return it.