Assign contents of Python dict to multiple variables at once?

Question

I would like to do something like this

def f():
    return { \'a\' : 1, \'b\' : 2, \'c\' : 3 }

{ a, b } = f()     # or { \'a\', \'b\' } = f() ?

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Answer 1

It wouldn't make any sense for unpacking to depend on the variable names. The closest you can get is:

a, b = [f()[k] for k in ('a', 'b')]

This, of course, evaluates f() twice.

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You could write a function:

def unpack(d, *keys)
    return tuple(d[k] for k in keys)

Then do:

a, b = unpack(f(), 'a', 'b')

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This is really all overkill though. Something simple would be better:

result = f()
a, b = result['a'], result['b']