How to access deeply nested dictionaries in Swift

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When working with dictionaries you have to remember that a key might not exist in the dictionary. For this reason, dictionaries always return optionals. So each time you access the dictionary by key you have to unwrap at each level as follows:

bugsDict["ladybug"]!["spotted"]!["red"]!++

I presume you know about optionals, but just to be clear, use the exclamation mark if you are 100% sure the key exists in the dictionary, otherwise it’s better to use the question mark:

bugsDict["ladybug"]?["spotted"]?["red"]?++

Addendum: This is the code I used for testing in playground:

var colorsDict = [String : Int]()
var patternsDict =  [String : [String : Int]] ()
var bugsDict = [String : [String : [String : Int]]] ()

colorsDict["red"] = 1
patternsDict["spotted"] = colorsDict
bugsDict["ladybug"] = patternsDict


bugsDict["ladybug"]!["spotted"]!["red"]!++ // Prints 1
bugsDict["ladybug"]!["spotted"]!["red"]!++ // Prints 2
bugsDict["ladybug"]!["spotted"]!["red"]!++ // Prints 3
bugsDict["ladybug"]!["spotted"]!["red"]! // Prints 4

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