Create A List Of Empty Dictionaries

I want to create a list of variable length containing empty directories. n = 10 # size of list foo = [] for _ in range(n) foo.append({}) Would you do this the same way, or is

Solution 1:

List comprehensions to the rescue!

foo = [{} for _ in range(n)]

There is no shorter notation, I am afraid. In Python 2 you use xrange(n) instead of range(n) to avoid materializing a useless list.

The alternative, [{}] * n creates a list of length n with only one dictionary, referenced n times. This leads to nasty surprises when adding keys to the dictionary.