Difference between cleaned_data and cleaned_data.get in Django

Question

I\'ve seen some samples codes like:

    def clean_message(self):
    message = self.cleaned_data[\'message\']
    num_words = len(message.split())
    if num_wor         


        

Answer 1

.get() is basically a shortcut for getting an element out of a dictionary. I usually use .get() when I'm not certain if the entry in the dictionary will be there. For example:

>>> cleaned_data = {'username': "bob", 'password': "secret"}
>>> cleaned_data['username']
'bob'
>>> cleaned_data.get('username')
'bob'
>>> cleaned_data['foo']
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
    KeyError: 'foo'
>>> cleaned_data.get('foo')  # No exception, just get nothing back.
>>> cleaned_data.get('foo', "Sane Default")
'Sane Default'

Answer 2

cleaned_data is a Python dictionary, you can access its values by:

Specifying the key between [ ]:

 self.cleaned_data[‘field’]

Using get() method:

self.cleaned_data.get(‘field’)

Difference between cleaned_data and cleaned_data.get in Django is that if the key does not exist in the dictionary, self.cleaned_data[‘field’] will raise a KeyError, while self.cleaned_data.get(‘field’) will return None.