Why dict.get(key) instead of dict[key]?

Question

Today, I came across the dict method get which, given a key in the dictionary, returns the associated value.

For what purpose is this funct

Answer 1

One difference, that can be an advantage, is that if we are looking for a key that doesn't exist we will get None, not like when we use the brackets notation, in which case we will get an error thrown:

print(dictionary.get("address")) # None
print(dictionary["address"]) # throws KeyError: 'address'

Last thing that is cool about the get method, is that it receives an additional optional argument for a default value, that is if we tried to get the score value of a student, but the student doesn't have a score key we can get a 0 instead.

So instead of doing this (or something similar):

score = None
try:
    score = dictionary["score"]
except KeyError:
    score = 0

We can do this:

score = dictionary.get("score", 0)
# score = 0