1. Introduction

When working with dictionaries in Python, it is a common requirement to isolate the keys for various operations such as iteration, analysis, or even just for reporting purposes. Converting dictionary keys to a list is a basic operation in Python and is quite straightforward. This blog post will demonstrate how to extract keys from a dictionary and convert them into a list.

Definition

Extracting keys from a dictionary involves creating a list that contains all the keys from the dictionary. Each key in the dictionary corresponds to an element in the new list. This task can be performed using the keys() method of a dictionary, which returns a view of the dictionary's keys that can then be converted into a list.

2. Program Steps

1. Initialize a dictionary from which the keys will be extracted.

2. Use the keys() method of the dictionary to access its keys.

3. Convert the keys to a list using the list() constructor.

4. Output the list of keys.

3. Code Program

# Step 1: Initialize the dictionary
my_dict = {'name': 'John', 'age': 30, 'city': 'New York'}

# Step 2: Use the keys() method to access the dictionary keys
dict_keys = my_dict.keys()

# Step 3: Convert the keys to a list
keys_list = list(dict_keys)

# Step 4: Print the list of keys
print(keys_list)

Output:

['name', 'age', 'city']

Explanation:

1. my_dict is a dictionary with string type keys.

2. dict_keys is a view object that displays the keys of my_dict, obtained by calling my_dict.keys().

3. keys_list is created by converting dict_keys into a list with the list() constructor. This step turns the view into a list, allowing list operations to be performed on the keys.

4. The output is the list of keys keys_list, which is printed to the console and contains all the keys from my_dict.