How to Remove a Key from a Dictionary in Python

Dictionaries in Python are extremely useful because they allow you to store data in key-value pairs.

After you create your dictionary, you can add elements by providing a key and a value.

However, you can also remove elements from a dictionary by providing a key.

In this post, we'll learn how to remove elements from a dictionary by key in Python.

How to remove an element by key

To start, let's look at initializing an example dictionary:

PYTHON
places = {
    "Paris": "France", 
    "London": "England", 
    "New York": "USA", 
    "Tokyo": "Japan"
}

print(places)

BASH
{'Paris': 'France', 'London': 'England', 'New York': 'USA', 'Tokyo': 'Japan'}

In this example, the key is the city name and the value is the country name.

Let's say you wanted to remove Paris from the dictionary.

Since that is already the key, you can use it with the del keyword.

PYTHON
places = {
    "Paris": "France", 
    "London": "England", 
    "New York": "USA", 
    "Tokyo": "Japan"
}

del places["Paris"]

print(places)

BASH
{'London': 'England', 'New York': 'USA', 'Tokyo': 'Japan'}

Keep in mind that when you use the del keyword, it will mutate the dictionary for all references.

This is fine because this is usually what you want to happen.

Conclusion

In this post, we learned how to remove elements from a dictionary by key in Python.

Simply use the del keyword to remove an element from a dictionary by passing in the key that you want removed.

Thanks for reading and happy coding!

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