Version 32 of dict tips and tricks

dicts are just like name value pair lists (but you shouldn't rely on any particular order of the pairs!) RS 2008-06-09: In fact, this is no longer true - from 8.5.0, dicts have a "chronological" order - each added element appears at the end. So you can even apply custom sorting of dict keys for display purposes:

proc dict'sort {dict args} {
    set res {}
    foreach key [lsort {*}$args [dict keys $dict]] {
        dict set res $key [dict get $dict $key] 
    }
    set res
}

#-- Test:

set d1 {foo 1 bar 2 grill 3}
puts 1:[dict'sort $d1]             ;# 1:bar 2 foo 1 grill 3
puts 2:[dict'sort $d1 -decreasing] ;# 2:grill 3 foo 1 bar 2

This works me correctly for Tcl 8.4 version posted by kruzalex

sugar::proc dict'sort {dict args} {
    set res {}
    foreach key [lsort {expand}$args [dict keys $dict]] {
        lappend a() $key [dict get $dict $key]
    }
    set res [lindex [array get a] 1]
}

or without sugar::proc

proc dict'sort {dict args} {
    set res {}
    foreach key [eval [list lsort] [lrange $args 0 end] [list [dict keys $dict]]] {
        lappend a() $key [dict get $dict $key]
    }
    set res [lindex [array get a] 1]
}

Just like the results of [array get], so you can [array set X [dict filter]]] or (conversely) [dict get [array get X] key].

So, you can define a proc fred {args} and then immediately treat $args as a dict, if (and only if) the values passed have the form of a dict - no special processing is required (rather, the shimmering occurs in the background.

This is useful for passing named arguments to a proc, sort of like the various options packages: [dict get $args -option] will fetch any value passed as -option value.

[dict with] alters the enclosing scope

So if you have a dict X, [dict with X {}] will construct and initialize variables with the same names and values as X's contents.

This is useful for passing around collections of named values.

You could use it to populate the variables in a namespace (for, say, a collection of defaults) [namespace eval dict with $dv {}]

JMN 2008-06-20 It appears that you can extend a dict using lappend. For the case of a loop where you know the newly added keys are not currently in the dict - might this be faster than using dict set? e.g

foreach val $newValues {
    lappend mydict [uuid::uuid generate] $val
}

or

lappend mydict {*}$newPairs

It also seems that even if you do lappend a key that is already in the dict, the [dict get], [dict size] etc methods still do the sensible thing, and use the latest entry in the list for a particular key. After this, upon using [dict set] - the earlier duplicate key-value pairs are automatically removed anyway.

I guess there might be some sort of shimmering in using list methods on the dict, but presumably in the above case the lappend would still be a win for large datasets because the existence of the key doesn't need to be checked each time a new value is added. Perhaps this gain is lost anyway once the dict is converted back to a proper dict value.

I've not had a chance to test the relative performance of this yet... so don't consider it as a tip/trick til you've verified it helps for your particular case!

In particular - it might be worth comparing the above with:

set mydict [dict merge $mydict $newPairs]

update: A few rough tests indicate that the lappend method is actually slower. The foreach loop does indeed run faster using [lappend], than [dict set] - but this time (and more!) is lost during the subsequent access of the value as a dict using [dict size $mydict]

For Tcl8.6a0 at least - it would seem the moral is, if you're going to be using it as a dict, just build it as a dict using the dict methods.

HaO I would not do that. The conceptual difference between dict and lists is that dict do not allow duplicate keys. Thus, if a list element appears again at the key position of the list (lindex 0, 2, 4, ...), the former key-value element is lost. Example:

% set d [dict create key1 val1 key1 val2]
key1 val2
% lappend d key1 val3
key1 val2 key1 val3
% dict set d key2 val4
key1 val3 key2 val4

if { [catch {dict keys ${d}}] } {
        error "error: pdict - argument is not a dict"
}

if {![string is list $d] || ([llength $d] & 1)} {
    error "not a dict"
}

proc getDictItem {dictVal keyVar} {
        upvar $keyVar keyVal
        if {[dict exist $dictVal $keyVar]} {
                set keyVal [dict get $dictVal $keyVar]
                return 1
        }
        return 0
}

# demo
set d [dict create a 1 b 2 c 3]
puts "dict value = $d"
if {[getDictItem $d "a"]} {
        puts "key 'a' exists in dict. a=$a"
}
if {![getDictItem $d "z"]} {
        puts "key 'z' not exists in dict."
}

% set l {a 1 b 2 a 3}

% dict create {*}$l
% dict merge $l $l
a 3 b 2

dict replace $l
dict merge $1
a 1 b 2 a 3

% dict for {k v} $l {puts -nonewline "$k $v "} ; puts ""
a 3 b 2
% dict size $l
2