A library providing keywords for handling lists and dictionaries.

Collections is Robot Framework's standard library that provides a set of keywords for handling Python lists and dictionaries. This library has keywords, for example, for modifying and getting values from lists and dictionaries (e.g. Append To List, Get From Dictionary) and for verifying their contents (e.g. Lists Should Be Equal, Dictionary Should Contain Value).

Table of contents

Related keywords in BuiltIn
Using with list-like and dictionary-like objects
Ignore case
Boolean arguments
Data in examples
Keywords

Following keywords in the BuiltIn library can also be used with lists and dictionaries:

Keyword Name	Applicable With
Create List	lists
Create Dictionary	dicts
Get Length	both
Length Should Be	both
Should Be Empty	both
Should Not Be Empty	both
Should Contain	both
Should Not Contain	both
Should Contain X Times	lists
Should Not Contain X Times	lists
Get Count	lists

Using with list-like and dictionary-like objects

List keywords that do not alter the given list can also be used with tuples, and to some extent also with other iterables. Convert To List can be used to convert tuples and other iterables to Python list objects.

Similarly, dictionary keywords can, for most parts, be used with other mappings. Convert To Dictionary can be used if real Python dict objects are needed.

Ignore case

Various keywords support ignoring case in comparisons by using the optional ignore_case argument. Case-insensitivity can be enabled by using ignore_case=True (see Boolean arguments) and it works recursively. With dictionaries, it is also possible to use special values keys and values to normalize only keys or values, respectively. These options themselves are case-insensitive and also singular forms key and value are supported.

If a dictionary contains keys that normalize to the same value, e.g. {'a': 1, 'A': 2}, normalizing keys causes an error.

Examples:

Lists Should Be Equal	${list1}	${list2}	ignore_case=True
Dictionaries Should Be Equal	${dict1}	${dict2}	ignore_case=values

Notice that some keywords accept also an older case_insensitive argument in addition to ignore_case. The latter is new in Robot Framework 7.0 and should be used unless there is a need to support older versions. The old argument is considered deprecated and will eventually be removed.

Boolean arguments

Some keywords accept arguments that are handled as Boolean values true or false. If such an argument is given as a string, it is considered false if it is an empty string or equal to FALSE, NONE, NO, OFF or 0, case-insensitively. Keywords verifying something that allow dropping actual and expected values from the possible error message also consider string no values to be false. Other strings are considered true regardless their value, and other argument types are tested using the same rules as in Python.

Should Contain Match	${list}	${pattern}	ignore_case=True
Should Contain Match	${list}	${pattern}	ignore_case=False
Lists Should Be Equal	${list1}	${list2}	Custom error	no values

Data in examples

List related keywords use variables in format ${Lx} in their examples. They mean lists with as many alphabetic characters as specified by x. For example, ${L1} means ['a'] and ${L3} means ['a', 'b', 'c'].

Dictionary keywords use similar ${Dx} variables. For example, ${D1} means {'a': 1} and ${D3} means {'a': 1, 'b': 2, 'c': 3}.

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