Why structured data formats are used in Python - See It in Action

Why structured data formats are used

📖 Scenario: Imagine you work in a small library. You want to keep track of books and their details like title, author, and year. You need a way to organize this information so you can find and use it easily.

🎯 Goal: You will create a simple program that uses a structured data format (a dictionary) to store book information. Then, you will add a filter to find books published after a certain year. Finally, you will print the filtered books.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary with book titles as keys and their details as nested dictionaries

Create a variable to hold the year threshold

Use a dictionary comprehension to filter books published after the threshold year

Print the filtered dictionary

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Libraries, stores, and many businesses use structured data formats like dictionaries to organize and quickly find information.

💼 Career

Knowing how to organize and filter data is important for jobs in data analysis, software development, and many other tech roles.

1

Create the books dictionary

Create a dictionary called books with these exact entries: 'The Hobbit' with details {'author': 'J.R.R. Tolkien', 'year': 1937}, '1984' with details {'author': 'George Orwell', 'year': 1949}, and 'Python 101' with details {'author': 'Michael Driscoll', 'year': 2014}.

Python

# Create the books dictionary with exact entries
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a dictionary with book titles as keys and another dictionary for details as values.

2

Set the year threshold

Create a variable called year_threshold and set it to 1950.

Python

books = {
    'The Hobbit': {'author': 'J.R.R. Tolkien', 'year': 1937},
    '1984': {'author': 'George Orwell', 'year': 1949},
    'Python 101': {'author': 'Michael Driscoll', 'year': 2014}
}
# Create the year_threshold variable and set it to 1950
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just create a variable and assign the number 1950 to it.

3

Filter books published after the threshold

Use a dictionary comprehension to create a new dictionary called recent_books that includes only books from books where the year is greater than year_threshold.

Python

books = {
    'The Hobbit': {'author': 'J.R.R. Tolkien', 'year': 1937},
    '1984': {'author': 'George Orwell', 'year': 1949},
    'Python 101': {'author': 'Michael Driscoll', 'year': 2014}
}
year_threshold = 1950
# Create recent_books using dictionary comprehension filtering by year
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use {key: value for key, value in dict.items() if condition} format.

4

Print the filtered books

Write a print statement to display the recent_books dictionary.

Python

books = {
    'The Hobbit': {'author': 'J.R.R. Tolkien', 'year': 1937},
    '1984': {'author': 'George Orwell', 'year': 1949},
    'Python 101': {'author': 'Michael Driscoll', 'year': 2014}
}
year_threshold = 1950
recent_books = {title: details for title, details in books.items() if details['year'] > year_threshold}
# Print the recent_books dictionary
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(recent_books) to show the filtered dictionary.