The Python Papers

The Python Papers

Python 201 – The Handy defaultdict

Mike Driscoll's avatar
Mike Driscoll
Dec 24, 2024
∙ Paid

The collections module has another handy tool called defaultdict. The defaultdict is a subclass of Python’s dict that accepts a default_factory as its primary argument. The default_factory is usually a Python type, such as int or list, but you can also use a function or a lambda too. Let’s start by creating a regular Python dictionary that counts the nu…

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