Python: An elegant way to delete empty lists from Python dictionary

Question

I have a dictionary as:

default = {\'a\': [\'alpha\'], \'b\': [\'beta\',\'gamma\'], \'g\': []}

I wish to eliminate the empty values as:

Answer 1

To fix your function, change del[k] to del d[k]. There is no function to delete values in place from a dictionary.

What you are doing is deleting the variable k, not changing the dictionary at all. This is why the original dictionary is always returned.

Rewritten, your function might look like:

def remove_empty_keys(d):
    for k in d.keys():
        if not d[k]:
            del d[k]

This assumes you want to eliminate both empty list and None values, and actually removes any item with a "false" value.