Python: Check if a value exists in the dictionary (3 Ways)

In this article we will discuss different ways to check if a value exists in a dictionary or not. We will cover the following ways,

Suppose we have a dictionary of strings and ints i.e.

# Dictionary of string and int
word_freq = {
    "Hello": 56,
    "at": 23,
    "test": 43,
    "this": 78
}

Now in this dictionary we want to check if any key contains the value 43 or not. There are different ways to look for a value in a dictionary, let’s discuss them one by one,

Check if value exist in dict using values() & if-in statement

Python dictionary provides a method values(), which returns a sequence of all the values associated with keys in the dictionary. We can use ‘in’ keyword to check if our value exists in that sequence of values or not. For example,

value = 43

# python check if value exist in dict using "in" & values()
if value in word_freq.values():
    print(f"Yes, Value: '{value}' exists in dictionary")
else:
    print(f"No, Value: '{value}' does not exists in dictionary")

Output:

Yes, Value: '43' exists in dictionary

Here, value 43 exists our dictionary therefore it in statement evaluated to True.

Let’s look at a negative example, where we will try to check for a value that does not exist in the dictionary. For example,

value = 51

# python check if value exist in dict using "in" & values()
if value in word_freq.values():
    print(f"Yes, Value: '{value}' exists in dictionary")
else:
    print(f"No, Value: '{value}' does not exists in dictionary")

Output:

No, Value: '51' does not exists in dictionary

Here, value 51 does not exist in our dictionary therefore if statement evaluated to False.

Related Articles:

• Get the key associated with a value in a dictionary.
• Python: check if key exists in dictionary (6 Ways)

Check if a value exists in python dictionary using for loop

We can iterate over all the key-value pairs of dictionary using a for loop and while iteration we can check if our value matches any value in the key-value pairs. We have created a separate function for this. Let’s understand this with an example,

def check_value_exist(test_dict, value):
    do_exist = False
    for key, val in test_dict.items():
        if val == value:
            do_exist = True
    return do_exist

value = 43

# Iterate over all key, value pairs in dict and check if value exist
if check_value_exist(word_freq, value):
    print(f"Yes, Value: '{value}' exists in dictionary")
else:
    print(f"No, Value: '{value}' does not exists in dictionary")

Output:

Yes, Value: '43' exists in dictionary

As value 43 exists in our dictionary, therefore check_value_exist() returned True.

Check if a value exists in a dictionary using any() and List comprehension

Using list comprehension, iterate over a sequence of all the key-value pairs in the dictionary and create a bool list. The list will contain a True for each occurrence of our value in the dictionary. Then call any() function on the list of bools to check if it contains any True. If yes then it means that our value exists in any key-value pair of the dictionary.

# Dictionary of string and int
word_freq = {
    "Hello": 56,
    "at": 23,
    "test": 43,
    "this": 78
}

value = 43

# Check if key exist in dictionary using any()
if any([True for k,v in word_freq.items() if v == value]):
    print(f"Yes, Value: '{value}' exists in dictionary")
else:
    print(f"No, Value: '{value}' does not exists in dictionary")

Output:

Yes, Value: '43' exists in dictionary

Here, value 43 exists in the dictionary therefore any() returned True.

Conclusion:

So, these were the different ways to check if a value exists in a dictionary or not.