Dictionary question

[perfringo]

can I not do this just using dictionary rather than a list of dictionary? I am specifically trying to learn about dictionaries here.

buran pointed out possibility: 'unless you want to make a more complex data structure'. You can have dictionary which value is dictionary as well. This way you can provide all the features with key, somthing along those lines:

>>> features = ['model', 'year', 'color']
>>> data = dict()
>>> data['Ford'] = dict(zip(features, ['Mustang', 2020, 'red']))
>>> data['Volvo'] = dict(zip(features, ['X90', 2020, 'white']))
>>> data
{'Ford': {'model': 'Mustang', 'year': 2020, 'color': 'red'}, 
 'Volvo': {'model': 'X90', 'year': 2020, 'color': 'white'}}
>>> data['Ford']['model']
'Mustang'

However, you probably see problem with that approach - you can have only one model per manufacturer as keys in dictionary must be unique. Therefore for similar records it is simpler to have list of dictionaries (or named tuples) and not introduce another layer of complexity to overcome key uniqueness requirement (value of key could be list of dictionaries for example where every model is one dictionary)