Tcl/Tk 8.5 Programming Cookbook

Determining the size of a dictionary

To more effectively interact with a dictionary, it is beneficial to know how many entries are contained within. To accomplish this, Tcl provides the dict size command. The syntax is as follows:

	dict size dictionaryValue

How to do it…

In the following example, we will create a dictionary containing collections of key/value pairs and then we will use the dict size command to determine the number of key/value pairs. Return values from the commands are provided for clarity. Enter the following command:

% set test [dict create 1 John 2 Mary 3 Paul]
1 John 2 Mary 3 Paul

% dict size $test
3

How it works…

The dict size command returns a count of the key/value pairs contained in the dictionary.