(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'
The standard way to write this in Python is with a dict whose elements are each a list or set. As stephan202 says, you can somewhat automate this with a defaultdict, but you don't have to.
Stephan202 has the right answer, use defaultdict. But if you want something with the interface of C++ STL multimap and much worse performance, you can do this:
Now when you iterate through multimap, you'll get pairs like you would in a std::multimap. Unfortunately, that means your loop code will start to look as ugly as C++.
def multimap_iter(multimap,minkey,maxkey=None):
maxkey = minkey if (maxkey is None) else maxkey
for k,v in multimap:
if k<minkey: continue
if k>maxkey: break
yield k,v
# this will print 'a','b'
for k,v in multimap_iter(multimap,3,3):
print v
In summary, defaultdict is really cool and leverages the power of python and you should use it.
class Multimap(dict):
def __setitem__(self, key, value):
if key not in self:
dict.__setitem__(self, key, [value]) # call super method to avoid recursion
else
self[key].append(value)
Please note that like multimap here values are also sorted in ascending order if the keys are the same (for key=2, 'b' comes before 'c' although we didn't append them in this order.)
If you want to get them in descending order just change the sorted() function like this: