Checking key in dictionary – performance experiment

Little experiment:

python -m timeit -r 100 -s "d={'a':'1', 'b':'2', 'c':'3'}" "d.has_key('a')"
1000000 loops, best of 100: 0.361 usec per loop

python -m timeit -r 100 -s "d={'a':'1', 'b':'2', 'c':'3'}" "'a' in d"
10000000 loops, best of 100: 0.159 usec per loop

Checking if dictionary has key using “in” is faster than using has_key() method.

Tested in Python 2.6