Fix Python – Removing multiple keys from a dictionary safely

Question

I know how to remove an entry, 'key' from my dictionary d, safely. You do:

if d.has_key('key'):
    del d['key']

However, I need to remove multiple entries from a dictionary safely. I was thinking of defining the entries in a tuple as I will need to do this more than once.

entities_to_remove = ('a', 'b', 'c')
for x in entities_to_remove:
    if x in d:
        del d[x]

However, I was wondering if there is a smarter way to do this?

Now we will see solution for issue: Removing multiple keys from a dictionary safely

Answer

Why not like this:

entries = ('a', 'b', 'c')
the_dict = {'b': 'foo'}

def entries_to_remove(entries, the_dict):
    for key in entries:
        if key in the_dict:
            del the_dict[key]

A more compact version was provided by mattbornski using dict.pop()

This question is answered By – Glaslos

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