Such a thing is not present in the standard library. You can use a defaultdict
though:
>>> from collections import defaultdict
>>> md = defaultdict(list)
>>> md[1].append('a')
>>> md[1].append('b')
>>> md[2].append('c')
>>> md[1]
['a', 'b']
>>> md[2]
['c']
(Instead of list
you may want to use set
, in which case you'd call .add
instead of .append
.)
As an aside: look at these two lines you wrote:
a[1] = 'a'
a[1] = 'b'
This seems to indicate that you want the expression a[1]
to be equal to two distinct values. This is not possible with dictionaries because their keys are unique and each of them is associated with a single value. What you can do, however, is extract all values inside the list associated with a given key, one by one. You can use iter
followed by successive calls to next
for that. Or you can just use two loops:
>>> for k, v in md.items():
... for w in v:
... print("md[%d] = '%s'" % (k, w))
...
md[1] = 'a'
md[1] = 'b'
md[2] = 'c'