The main operations on a dictionary are storing a value with some key and
extracting the value given the key. It is also possible to delete a key:value
pair with ``del``. If you store using a key that is already in use, the old
-value associated with that key is forgotten. It is an error to extract a value
-using a non-existent key.
+value associated with that key is forgotten.
+
+Extracting a value for a non-existent key by subscripting (``d[key]``) raises a
+:exc:`KeyError`. To avoid getting this error when trying to access a possibly
+non-existent key, use the :meth:`~dict.get` method instead, which returns
+``None`` (or a specified default value) if the key is not in the dictionary.
Performing ``list(d)`` on a dictionary returns a list of all the keys
used in the dictionary, in insertion order (if you want it sorted, just use
{'jack': 4098, 'sape': 4139, 'guido': 4127}
>>> tel['jack']
4098
+ >>> tel['irv']
+ Traceback (most recent call last):
+ File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
+ KeyError: 'irv'
+ >>> print(tel.get('irv'))
+ None
>>> del tel['sape']
>>> tel['irv'] = 4127
>>> tel