Message 174507 - Python tracker (original) (raw)

I normally use dictionaries for configuration purposes in python, but there's a problem where I have a dictionary with many key<->values and one of the keys is repeated. For example:

lives_in = { 'lion': ['Africa', 'America], 'parrot': ['Europe'], #... 100+ more rows here 'lion': ['Europe'], #... 100+ more rows here }

will end up with animal_lives_in['lion'] = 'Europe'. There's no way to detect that I've written a mistake in the code because python won't tell me there's a duplicated key assigned. It's easy to see when you have few keys but hard when you've got many.

I think it should atleast raise a warning when this happens.