How to add or increment a dictionary entry?

Question

I\'m currently re-engaging with Python after a long absence and loving it. However, I find myself coming across a pattern over and over. I keep thinking that there must be a

Answer 1

You can also take advantage of the control structure in exception handling. A KeyError exception is thrown by a dictionary when you try to assign a value to a non-existent key:

my_dict = {}
try:
    my_dict['a'] += 1
except KeyError, err:    # in 2.6: `except KeyError as err:`
    my_dict['a'] = 1