The Python defaultdict type behaves almost exactly like a regular Python dictionary, but if you try to access or modify a missing key, the defaultdict will automatically insert the key and generate a default value for it.
While instantiating a defaultdict, we pass in a function that tells it how to create a default value for missing keys.
>>> from collections import defaultdict
>>> my_dict = defaultdict(int)
>>> my_dict
defaultdict(<class 'int'>, {})In this example, we've used the int class which returns 0 when called like a function, so any missing key will get a default value of 0. You can also get an empty list by default with list or an empty string with str.
>>> my_dict["foo"]
0
>>> my_dict["bar"] += 5
>>> my_dict
defaultdict(<class 'int'>, {'foo': 0, 'bar': 5})docs to learn even more!