Why does Pycharm's inspector complain about “d = {}”?

Question

When initializing a dictionary with d = {} Pycharm\'s code inspector generates a warning, saying

This dictionary creation could be rewrit

Answer 1

This can be disabled in the Project Settings or Default Settings.

• Navigate to Settings -> Inspections -> Python
• Uncheck "Dictionary creation could be rewritten by dictionary literal"

Answer 2

What is the following code to your dictionary declaration?

I think pycharm will trigger the error if you have something like:

dic = {}
dic['aaa'] = 5

as you could have written

dic = {'aaa': 5}

BTW: The fact that the error goes away if you use the function doesn't necessarily mean that pycharm believes dict() is a literal. It could just mean that it doesn't complain for:

dic = dict()
dic['aaa'] = 5

HTH!

Answer 3

I have a situation where this warning is bugging the hell out of me. In my case, I'm populating my dict partially as literals and partially from a tuple output by a function, like so:

def get_other_values():
    return 3, 4

foo = {
    "a": 1,
    "b": 2
}
foo["c"], foo["d"] = get_other_values()

So, unless I create interim vars for the output of get_other_values, PEP8 generates this warning even though I'm creating the dict with literals. And I can't assign the c and d keys in the literal, since the values are output as a tuple.

Answer 4

mydict = {
  a: 5,
  b:z+c/2
}

The dictionary could have been created directly without initialising them first and then reassigning new values.

Answer 5

for those who like (just like me) to initialize dictionaries with single operation

d = {
  'a': 12,
  'b': 'foo',
  'c': 'bar'
}

instead of many lines like

d = dict()
d['a'] = 12
d['b'] = ....

in the end I ended up with this:

d = dict()
d.update({
  'a': 12,
  'b': 'foo',
  'c': 'bar'
})

Pycharm is not complaining on this