From Which Direction Swift Starts to Read Dictionaries

Iterating Through a Dictionary in Swift

Dictionaries in Swift (and other languages) are not ordered. When you iterate through the dictionary, there's no guarantee that the order will match the initialization order. In this example, Swift processes the "Square" key before the others. You can see this by adding a print statement to the loop. 25 is the 5th element of Square so largest would be set 5 times for the 5 elements in Square and then would stay at 25.

let interestingNumbers = [
    "Prime": [2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13],
    "Fibonacci": [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8],
    "Square": [1, 4, 9, 16, 25]
]
var largest = 0
for (kind, numbers) in interestingNumbers {
    println("kind: \(kind)")
    for number in numbers {
        if number > largest {
            largest = number
        }
    }
}
largest

This prints:

kind: Square
kind: Prime
kind: Fibonacci

How do I get the key at a specific index from a Dictionary in Swift?

That's because keys returns LazyMapCollection<[Key : Value], Key>, which can't be subscripted with an Int. One way to handle this is to advance the dictionary's startIndex by the integer that you wanted to subscript by, for example:

let intIndex = 1 // where intIndex < myDictionary.count
let index = myDictionary.index(myDictionary.startIndex, offsetBy: intIndex)
myDictionary.keys[index]

Another possible solution would be to initialize an array with keys as input, then you can use integer subscripts on the result:

let firstKey = Array(myDictionary.keys)[0] // or .first

Remember, dictionaries are inherently unordered, so don't expect the key at a given index to always be the same.

Using map on a Dictionary in Swift 2, to return a Dictionary

The reason is that map can return only arrays, and not dictionaries. To obtain a dictionary you have several strategies, for instance:

var loggers : [String: XCGLogger] = [:]
dictionary.map{(n, l) in loggers[n] = newLogger(l.0, withLevel: level(l.1))}

or perhaps:

var loggers : [String: XCGLogger] = [:]
for (n, l) in dictionary {
  loggers[n] = newLogger(l.0, withLevel: level(l.1))
}

loggers

Swift - Stored values order is completely changed in Dictionary

This is because of the definition of Dictionaries:

Dictionary

A dictionary stores associations between keys of the same type and values of the same type in an collection with no defined ordering.

There is no order, they might come out differently than they were put in.
This is comparable to NSSet.

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Edit:

NSDictionary

Dictionaries Collect Key-Value Pairs. Rather than simply maintaining an ordered or unordered collection of objects, an NSDictionary stores objects against given keys, which can then be used for retrieval.

There is also no order, however there is sorting on print for debugging purposes.

Swift Array/Dictionary is not printing back in expected order

In the swift docs, under "Dictionaries":

Unlike items in an array, items in a dictionary do not have a specified order. You use a dictionary when you need to look up values based on their identifier, in much the same way that a real-world dictionary is used to look up the definition for a particular word.

It is not possible to preserve the order if you use dictionaries in swift.

In the same docs, it says:

Arrays are ordered collections of values. Sets are unordered collections of unique values. Dictionaries are unordered collections of key-value associations.

I suggest you read through the official documents.

What's the cleanest way of applying map() to a dictionary in Swift?

Swift 4+

Good news! Swift 4 includes a mapValues(_:) method which constructs a copy of a dictionary with the same keys, but different values. It also includes a filter(_:) overload which returns a Dictionary, and init(uniqueKeysWithValues:) and init(_:uniquingKeysWith:) initializers to create a Dictionary from an arbitrary sequence of tuples. That means that, if you want to change both the keys and values, you can say something like:

let newDict = Dictionary(uniqueKeysWithValues:
    oldDict.map { key, value in (key.uppercased(), value.lowercased()) })

There are also new APIs for merging dictionaries together, substituting a default value for missing elements, grouping values (converting a collection into a dictionary of arrays, keyed by the result of mapping the collection over some function), and more.

During discussion of the proposal, SE-0165, that introduced these features, I brought up this Stack Overflow answer several times, and I think the sheer number of upvotes helped demonstrate the demand. So thanks for your help making Swift better!

How to access deeply nested dictionaries in Swift

When working with dictionaries you have to remember that a key might not exist in the dictionary. For this reason, dictionaries always return optionals. So each time you access the dictionary by key you have to unwrap at each level as follows:

bugsDict["ladybug"]!["spotted"]!["red"]!++

I presume you know about optionals, but just to be clear, use the exclamation mark if you are 100% sure the key exists in the dictionary, otherwise it's better to use the question mark:

bugsDict["ladybug"]?["spotted"]?["red"]?++

Addendum: This is the code I used for testing in playground:

var colorsDict = [String : Int]()
var patternsDict =  [String : [String : Int]] ()
var bugsDict = [String : [String : [String : Int]]] ()

colorsDict["red"] = 1
patternsDict["spotted"] = colorsDict
bugsDict["ladybug"] = patternsDict

bugsDict["ladybug"]!["spotted"]!["red"]!++ // Prints 1
bugsDict["ladybug"]!["spotted"]!["red"]!++ // Prints 2
bugsDict["ladybug"]!["spotted"]!["red"]!++ // Prints 3
bugsDict["ladybug"]!["spotted"]!["red"]! // Prints 4

Dictionary print key and value in Swift 4

Dictionary :

A dictionary stores associations between keys of the same type and values of the same type in a collection with no defined ordering.

Each value is associated with a unique key, which acts as an identifier for that value within the dictionary. Unlike items in an array, items in a dictionary do not have a specified order.

Array - An array stores values of the same type in an ordered list.

Sets - A set stores distinct values of the same type in a collection with no defined ordering.

From Apple documentation

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