Looping through a dict

It seems I’ve never looped through a dict in Python before. I just assumed that it would work the same as with a PHP associative array, since the syntax of creating one is fairly similar. I just thought this would work:

for key, value in somedict:
    print key, ': ', value

But I guess not.

You have to call the items or iteritems functions on the dictionary, where iteritems is faster, but also doesn’t allow certain actions that items might:

for key, value in somedict.iteritems():
    print key, ': ', value

I was trying to loop through a dictionary in a django template like so:

{% for key, value in somedict %}
  {{ key }}: {{ value }}<br/>
{% endfor %}

Which, since it just skips over most errors, generated this response:

:
:
:
:
:

Which I only later found out was caused by an error when trying it in some regular python code. It should be:

{% for key, value in somedict.iteritems %}
  {{ key }}: {{ value }}<br/>
{% endfor %}

I feel like this shouldn’t have happened to me. Oh well, now I know…