How to iterate over a string and for each letter, if it is in a dictionary, append that word to the end of `syr_list`

I have a dictionary called to_nato that looks like this:

to_nato = {'a': 'alfa',
           'b': 'bravo',
           'c': 'charlie',
           'd': 'delta',
           'e': 'echo',
           'f': 'foxtrot',
           'g': 'golf',
           'h': 'hotel',
           'i': 'india'}

I need to write loop to iterate over a string "stateofny" and for each letter, if it is in a dictionary, append that word to the end of syr_list

I am trying this:

syr_str="stateofny"
syr_list=[]

for letter in syr_str:
    for key, value in zip(to_nato.keys(), to_nato.values()):
                if letter == key:
                   syr_list.append(value) 
print(syr_list)

but it returns empty list. What am I doing wrong?

>Solution :

Your method works fine, it doesn’t return an empty list (assuming that you had a typo in your post, and your to_nato is actually a valid dictionary). That being said, that’s not how you use a dictionary. The sole purpose of a dictionary is to make it easier to randomly access elements, without using for loops and if statements.

This is a better version of your code:

for letter in syr_str:
    if letter in to_nato:
        syr_list.append(to_nato[letter])

Or, using a list comprehension:

syr_list = [to_nato[letter] for letter in syr_str if letter in to_nato]