Use variable as dictionary key in Django template

Question

I\'d like to use a variable as an key in a dictionary in a Django template. I can\'t for the life of me figure out how to do it. If I have a product with a name or ID field,

Answer 1

Building on eviltnan's answer, his filter will raise an exception if key isn't a key of dict.

Filters should never raise exceptions, but should fail gracefully. This is a more robust/complete answer:

@register.filter
def keyvalue(dict, key):    
    try:
        return dict[key]
    except KeyError:
        return ''

Basically, this would do the same as dict.get(key, '') in Python code, and could also be written that way if you don't want to include the try/except block, although it is more explicit.