Merging two lists into dictionary while keeping duplicate data in python

Question

Hi, I want to merge two lists into one dictionary. Suppose I have two lists such as below

list_one = [\'a\', \'a\', \'c\', \'d\']

list_two = [1,2,3,4]

Answer 1

The keys in dictionary should be unique.

According to python documentation:

It is best to think of a dictionary as an unordered set of key: value pairs, with the requirement that the keys are unique (within one dictionary).

link to the documentation

Answer 2

Dictionaries must have unique keys, so you would have to change your requirement. How about a list of tuples as a workaround?

l = list(zip(['a', 'a', 'c', 'd'],[1,2,3,4]))
print(l)

With the resulting being:

[('a', 1), ('a', 2), ('c', 3), ('d', 4)]

You can easily iterate over and unpack like so:

for k, v in l:
    print("%s: %s" % (k, v))

which produces:

a: 1
a: 2
c: 3
d: 4

If you want it hashable, you can create a tuple of tuples like so:

l = tuple(zip(['a', 'a', 'c', 'd'],[1,2,3,4]))