Python data structure for a collection of objects with random access based on an attribute

Question

I need a collection of objects which can be looked up by a certain (unique) attribute common to each of the objects. Right now I am using a dicitionary assigning the dictionary

Answer 1

Well, dict really is what you want. What may be cumbersome is not the dict itself, but the way you are building it. Here is a slight enhancement to your example, showing how to use a list expression and the dict constructor to easily create your lookup dict. This also shows how to create a multimap kind of dict, to look up matching items given a field value that might be duplicated across items:

class Item(object):
    def __init__(self, **kwargs):
        self.__dict__.update(kwargs)
    def __str__(self):
        return str(self.__dict__)
    def __repr__(self):
        return str(self)

allitems = [
    Item(key="red", title="foo"),
    Item(key="green", title="foo"),
    Item(key="blue", title="foofoo"),
    ]

# if fields are unique
itemByKey = dict([(i.key,i) for i in allitems])

# if field value can be duplicated across items
# (for Python 2.5 and higher, you could use a defaultdict from 
# the collections module)
itemsByTitle = {}
for i in allitems:
    if i.title in itemsByTitle:
        itemsByTitle[i.title].append(i)
    else:
        itemsByTitle[i.title] = [i]



print itemByKey["red"]
print itemsByTitle["foo"]

Prints:

{'key': 'red', 'title': 'foo'}
[{'key': 'red', 'title': 'foo'}, {'key': 'green', 'title': 'foo'}]