The commands dict.items()
, dict.keys()
and dict.values()
return a copy of the dictionary's list of (k, v)
pair, keys and values.
This could take a lot of memory if the copied list is very large.
The commands dict.iteritems()
, dict.iterkeys()
and dict.itervalues()
return an iterator over the dictionary’s (k, v)
pair, keys and values.
The commands dict.viewitems()
, dict.viewkeys()
and dict.viewvalues()
return the view objects, which can reflect the dictionary's changes.
(I.e. if you del
an item or add a (k,v)
pair in the dictionary, the view object can automatically change at the same time.)
$ python2.7
>>> d = {'one':1, 'two':2}
>>> type(d.items())
<type 'list'>
>>> type(d.keys())
<type 'list'>
>>>
>>>
>>> type(d.iteritems())
<type 'dictionary-itemiterator'>
>>> type(d.iterkeys())
<type 'dictionary-keyiterator'>
>>>
>>>
>>> type(d.viewitems())
<type 'dict_items'>
>>> type(d.viewkeys())
<type 'dict_keys'>
In Py3.x, things are more clean, since there are only dict.items()
, dict.keys()
and dict.values()
available, which return the view objects just as dict.viewitems()
in Py2.x did.
Just as @lvc noted, view object isn't the same as iterator, so if you want to return an iterator in Py3.x, you could use iter(dictview)
:
$ python3.3
>>> d = {'one':'1', 'two':'2'}
>>> type(d.items())
<class 'dict_items'>
>>>
>>> type(d.keys())
<class 'dict_keys'>
>>>
>>>
>>> ii = iter(d.items())
>>> type(ii)
<class 'dict_itemiterator'>
>>>
>>> ik = iter(d.keys())
>>> type(ik)
<class 'dict_keyiterator'>