Safely Checking for Key Existence in a Dictionary

In this lesson, we’ll explore the get() method, which is used to safely check for the existence of keys in a dictionary.

The get() function accepts two parameters.

The first parameter is the key you want to search for, and the second parameter is the default value to return if the key does not exist.

Parameter: A variable that handles the values passed to a function.

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my_dict = {'name': 'CodeBuddies', 'age': 30}
country = my_dict.get('country', 'Not Found')

# Since the 'country' key is absent, it returns the default value 'Not Found'
print(country)

If no default value is provided as the second argument, the method returns None when the specified key does not exist.

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my_dict = {'name': 'CodeBuddies', 'age': 30}
country = my_dict.get('country')

# Since the 'country' key is absent, it returns the default value 'None'
print(country)

In the code above, we used the get function to search for the country key.

However, since the country key does not exist in the dictionary, the get method returns to its default value of None.