Confusing part

• I had the absurd thought that if you passed a key as a parameter when popping from a dictionary, only the value would remain -> Correct answer: the dictionary’s key-value pair is removed entirely.

If you use Dictionary pop()?

• The key-value pairs disappear
• If you assign the result to a new variable when popping, the value is assigned, and the dictionary’s key-value pairs disappear.

ex)

# random sales dictionary
sales = { 'apple': 2, 'orange': 3, 'grapes': 4 }

element = sales.pop('apple')

print('The popped element is:', element)
print('The dictionary is:', sales)

Output

The popped element is: 2
The dictionary is: {'orange': 3, 'grapes': 4}

Syntax

Syntax of Dictionary pop() The syntax of the pop() method is

dictionary.pop(key[, default])

The pop() method takes two parameters:

• key - the key to be searched for removal
• default - the default value to be returned when the key is not in the dictionary

Return value from pop()

The pop() method returns:

If the key is found - the removed/popped element from the dictionary If the key is not found - the value specified as the second argument (default) If the key is not found and the default argument is not specified - a KeyError exception is raised

Source: https://www.programiz.com/python-programming/methods/dictionary/pop