cannot delete specified length entry in dictionary?

[gunbuster363]

Hi,
I have a dictionary storing many things... I would like to delete entries which have key of len < 3. But after I do the del statement, there are still lots of entries with len < 3, what happens?

for w in fdict.keys()[:]:
 if w.strip() in banset or len(w.strip()) < 3 or len(w.strip()) > 25:
  del fdict[w]
 elif isinstance(w, unicode):
  del fdict[w]

for w in fdict.keys():
 if len(w) < 3:
  print w, len(w)

some sample result of the print statement above:
ld 2
lg 2
lr 2
lv 2
ly 2
l? 2
l? 2
mi 2
mk 2
mt 2
np 2
nr 2
oc 2
oj 2
om 2
oo 2
ou 2
o? 2
p3 2
pl 2
pt 2
ri 2
rn 2
ro 2
sc 2
sf 2
sg 2
sh 2
sk 2
te 2
tt 2
u? 2
vg 2
vv 2
wk 2
x2 2
yu 2
zi 2
?? 2
?? 2
?? 2
?? 2
?& 2
?? 2
?? 2
? 1
? 1
? 1
? 1
? 1
? 1
? 1

Thanks in advance.

Raymond

[bumsfeld]

d1 = {'a': 1, 'bc': 2, 'def': 3, 'gh': 4, 'ijkl': 5}

# make shallow copy of d and process the copy
d2 = d1.copy()
for key in d1.keys():
    if len(key) < 3:
        del d2[key]

print(d1)  # {'a': 1, 'ijkl': 5, 'gh': 4, 'def': 3, 'bc': 2}
print(d2)  # {'ijkl': 5, 'def': 3}

[gunbuster363]

It works! Thanks!
But why?

[vegaseat]

You don't want to change the dictionary you are iterating over.

[gunbuster363]

You don't want to change the dictionary you are iterating over.

Thanks....