["python","dictionary"]
Filter dict to contain only certain keys?

I've got a dict that has a whole bunch of entries. I'm only interested in a select few of them. Is there an easy way to prune all the other ones out?
Constructing a new dict: dict_you_want = {key: old_dict[key] for key in your_keys} Uses dictionary comprehension. If you use a version which lacks them (ie Python 2.6 and earlier), make it dict((key, old_dict[key]) for ...). It's the same, though uglier. Note that this, unlike jnnnnn's version, has stable performance (depends only on number of your_keys) for old_dicts of any size. Both in terms of speed and memory. Since this is a generator expression, it processes one item at a time, and it doesn't looks through all items of old_dict. Removing everything in-place: unwanted = set(old_dict) - set(your_keys) for unwanted_key in unwanted: del your_dict[unwanted_key]