Is it reasonable to use None as a dictionary key in Python?

None seems to work as a dictionary key, but I am wondering if that will just lead to trouble later. For example, this works:

>>> x={'a':1, 'b':2, None:3}
>>> x
{'a': 1, None: 3, 'b': 2}
>>> x[None]
3

The actual data I am working with is educational standards. Every standard is associated with a content area. Some standards are also associated with content subareas. I would like to make a nested dictionary of the form {contentArea:{contentSubArea:[standards]}}. Some of those contentSubArea keys would be None.

In particular, I am wondering if this will lead to confusion if I look for a key that does not exist at some point, or something unanticipated like that.

Any hashable value is a valid Python Dictionary Key. For this reason, None is a perfectly valid candidate. There's no confusion when looking for non-existent keys - the presence of None as a key would not affect the ability to check for whether another key was present. Ex:

>>> d = {1: 'a', 2: 'b', None: 'c'}
>>> 1 in d
True
>>> 5 in d
False
>>> None in d
True

There's no conflict, and you can test for it just like normal. It shouldn't cause you a problem. The standard 1-to-1 Key-Value association still exists, so you can't have multiple things in the None key, but using None as a key shouldn't pose a problem by itself.

You want trouble? here we go:

>>> json.loads(json.dumps({None:None}))
{u'null': None}

So yea, better stay away from json if you do use None as a key. You can patch this by custom (de/)serializer, but I would advise against use of None as a key in the first place.

None is not special in any particular way, it's just another python value. Its only distinction is that it happens to be the return value of a function that doesn't specify any other return value, and it also happens to be a common default value (the default arg of dict.get(), for instance).

You won't cause any run-time conflicts using such a key, but you should ask yourself if that's really a meaningful value to use for a key. It's often more helpful, from the point of view of reading code and understanding what it does, to use a designated instance for special values. Something like:

NoSubContent = SubContentArea(name=None)

{"contentArea": 
    {NoSubContent:[standards], 
     SubContentArea(name="Fruits"): ['apples', 'bananas']}}

jsonify does not support a dictionary with None key.

From Flask import jsonify

def json_():
    d = {None: 'None'}
    return jsonify(d)

This will throw an error:
TypeError: '<' not supported between instances of 'NoneType' and 'str'

It seems to me, the larger, later problem is this. If your process is creating pairs and some pairs have a "None" key, then it will overwrite all the previous None pairs. Your dictionary will silently throw out values because you had duplicate None keys. No?

Funny though, even this works :

d = {None: 'None'}

In [10]: None in d
Out[10]: True