Filter list of dictionaries

Question

This is my example:

dictlist = [{\'first\': \'James\', \'last\': \'Joule\'}, 
            {\'first\': \'James\',\'last\': \'Watt\'},
            {\'first\':          


        

Answer 1

I sometimes like to use next:

next((d['last'] for d in dictlist if d['first'] == 'Christian'), None)
# 'Doppler'

The first argument is an iterator and the second (optional) argument is the default value returned if no matching entry is found.

Note: this will only return the first matching result. So it wouldn't be good if you expect to have multiple records matching your "query".