Nested Data Structures

What You’ll Learn

You’ll learn how to combine lists and dictionaries to build complex data structures, similar to JSON.

Dictionaries inside a List

This is a very common pattern when representing rows from a database or an API response.

users = [
    {"id": 1, "name": "Alice", "role": "Admin"},
    {"id": 2, "name": "Bob", "role": "User"},
    {"id": 3, "name": "Charlie", "role": "User"}
]

# Accessing Bob's role:
print(users[1]["role"]) # User

# Looping through all users:
for u in users:
    print(u["name"])

Lists inside a Dictionary

Useful for when a single entity has multiple items associated with it.

restaurant = {
    "name": "Pizza Planet",
    "menu": ["Pepperoni", "Margherita", "Hawaiian"],
    "rating": 4.5
}

# Accessing the second menu item:
print(restaurant["menu"][1]) # Margherita

Dictionaries inside Dictionaries

company = {
    "employee1": {"name": "John", "salary": 50000},
    "employee2": {"name": "Jane", "salary": 60000}
}