How to add multiple values to a dictionary key?

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Make the value a list, e.g.

a["abc"] = [1, 2, "bob"]

UPDATE:

There are a couple of ways to add values to key, and to create a list if one isn’t already there. I’ll show one such method in little steps.

key = "somekey"
a.setdefault(key, [])
a[key].append(1)

Results:

>>> a
{'somekey': [1]}

Next, try:

key = "somekey"
a.setdefault(key, [])
a[key].append(2)

Results:

>>> a
{'somekey': [1, 2]}

The magic of setdefault is that it initializes the value for that key if that key is not defined. Now, noting that setdefault returns the value, you can combine these into a single line:

a.setdefault("somekey", []).append("bob")

Results:

>>> a
{'somekey': [1, 2, 'bob']}

You should look at the dict methods, in particular the get() method, and do some experiments to get comfortable with this.

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