AttributeError: 'dict' object has no attribute 'id' (Python)

AttributeError: 'dict' object has no attribute 'id' (Python) #

The Python "AttributeError: 'dict' object has no attribute 'id'" occurs when we use dot notation instead of bracket notation to access the id key in a dictionary. To solve the error, use bracket notation when accessing the key, e.g. my_dict['id'].

Here is an example of how the error occurs.

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my_dict = {'id': 1,  'name': 'Alice'}

# ⛔️ AttributeError: 'dict' object has no attribute 'id'
print(my_dict.id)

Use bracket notation to access keys in in the dictionary.

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my_dict = {'id': 1,  'name': 'Alice'}

# ✅ using bracket notation
print(my_dict['id'])  # 👉️ 1
print(my_dict['name'])  # 👉️ "Alice"

# ✅ using get() method to avoid errors if key not in dict
print(my_dict.get('id'))  # 👉️ 1
print(my_dict.get('name'))  # 👉️ "Alice"

Python uses bracket notation to access a key of a dictionary. However, it should be noted that if the key is not present in the dict object, a KeyError is thrown.

The dict.get method returns the value for the given key if the key is in the dictionary, otherwise a default value is returned.

The method takes the following 2 parameters:

If a value for the default parameter is not provided, it defaults to None, so the get() method never raises a KeyError.

A good way to start debugging is to print(dir(your_object)) and see what attributes a dictionary has.

Here is an example of what printing the attributes of a dict looks like.

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my_dict = {'name': 'Alice', 'age': 30}

# [...'clear', 'copy', 'fromkeys', 'get', 'items', 'keys',
#  'pop', 'popitem', 'setdefault', 'update', 'values' ...]
print(dir(my_dict))

If you pass a class to the dir() function, it returns a list of names of the classes' attributes, and recursively of the attributes of its bases.

If you try to access any attribute that is not in this list, you would get the "AttributeError: 'dict' object has no attribute error".

Since dict objects don't have an id attribute, the error is caused.