using bisect on list of tuples but compare using first value only

Question

I read that question about how to use bisect on a list of tuples, and I used that information to answer that question. It works, but I\'d like a more generic so

Answer 1

bisect supports arbitrary sequences. If you need to use bisect with a key, instead of passing the key to bisect, you can build it into the sequence:

class KeyList(object):
    # bisect doesn't accept a key function, so we build the key into our sequence.
    def __init__(self, l, key):
        self.l = l
        self.key = key
    def __len__(self):
        return len(self.l)
    def __getitem__(self, index):
        return self.key(self.l[index])

Then you can use bisect with a KeyList, with O(log n) performance and no need to copy the bisect source or write your own binary search:

bisect.bisect_right(KeyList(test_array, key=lambda x: x[0]), 5)