How to get dictionary values as a list in Python

When you need to get the values of a dictionary as a list, there are 4 solutions you can use:

1. Using the list() function and dict.values() method
2. Unpack the values as a list using the asterisk * symbol
3. Using a list comprehension
4. Using a for loop

I will show you how to use these 4 solutions in practice

1. Using list() and dict.values() method

To extract the values from a dictionary, you can use the dict.values() method. After that, you only need to call the list() function to convert the output to a list

Here’s an example:

organization = {
    'ceo': 'Nathan',
    'coo': 'Andy',
    'cfo': 'Johnny'
}

my_list = list(organization.values())

print(my_list)

Output:

['Nathan', 'Andy', 'Johnny']

As you can see, the solution successfully extracted the values from the dictionary.

2. Unpack the values as a list using the asterisk * symbol

As an alternative, you can also unpack the values as a list using the asterisk * symbol as follows:

organization = {
    'ceo': 'Nathan',
    'coo': 'Andy',
    'cfo': 'Johnny'
}

my_list = [*organization.values()]

print(my_list)

Output:

['Nathan', 'Andy', 'Johnny']

The starred expression unpacks the values from the dict_value iterable object, and we used a list [] to store the unpacked values.

3. Using a list comprehension

Another way to extract values from a dictionary is to use a list comprehension and the dict.values() method:

organization = {
    'ceo': 'Nathan',
    'coo': 'Andy',
    'cfo': 'Johnny'
}

my_list = [i for i in organization.values()]

print(my_list)

Output:

['Nathan', 'Andy', 'Johnny']

Similar to the starred expression, the list comprehension uses a for loop to extract each item in the dict_values object to a list.

4. Using a for loop

You can also use a for loop to iterate over the dictionary itself:

organization = {
    'ceo': 'Nathan',
    'coo': 'Andy',
    'cfo': 'Johnny'
}

my_list = []
for i in organization.values():
    my_list.append(i)

print(my_list)

Output:

['Nathan', 'Andy', 'Johnny']

In this solution, you need to create an empty list before running the for loop.

And that’s how you get the dictionary values as a list in Python. You might also want to check my other tutorial on getting the first key in a Python dictionary.