Determine whether a key is present in a dictionary [duplicate]

Answer 1

In terms of bytecode, in saves a LOAD_ATTR and replaces a CALL_FUNCTION with a COMPARE_OP.

>>> dis.dis(indict)
  2           0 LOAD_GLOBAL              0 (name)
              3 LOAD_GLOBAL              1 (d)
              6 COMPARE_OP               6 (in)
              9 POP_TOP             


>>> dis.dis(haskey)
  2           0 LOAD_GLOBAL              0 (d)
              3 LOAD_ATTR                1 (haskey)
              6 LOAD_GLOBAL              2 (name)
              9 CALL_FUNCTION            1
             12 POP_TOP             

My feelings are that in is much more readable and is to be preferred in every case that I can think of.

In terms of performance, the timing reflects the opcode

$ python -mtimeit -s'd = dict((i, i) for i in range(10000))' "'foo' in d"
 10000000 loops, best of 3: 0.11 usec per loop

$ python -mtimeit -s'd = dict((i, i) for i in range(10000))' "d.has_key('foo')"
  1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.205 usec per loop

in is almost twice as fast.