The more verbose way of getting the value from a key in a dictionary in Python involves checking if the key exists first and then reading the value. Otherwise an exception would be raised.
Like so:

dict = {'key':'value'}
if dict.has_key('key'):
    print dict['key']
else:
    print 'no such key'

The .get() method will do all that for you:

print dict.get('key', 'no such key') 

This is far more compact and expressive. Ref: Python Mapping Types – dictionary