Python list of dictionaries search

Question

Assume I have this:

[
{\"name\": \"Tom\", \"age\": 10},
{\"name\": \"Mark\", \"age\": 5},
{\"name\": \"Pam\", \"age\": 7}
]

and by searchin

Answer 1

@Frédéric Hamidi's answer is great. In Python 3.x the syntax for .next() changed slightly. Thus a slight modification:

>>> dicts = [
     { "name": "Tom", "age": 10 },
     { "name": "Mark", "age": 5 },
     { "name": "Pam", "age": 7 },
     { "name": "Dick", "age": 12 }
 ]
>>> next(item for item in dicts if item["name"] == "Pam")
{'age': 7, 'name': 'Pam'}

As mentioned in the comments by @Matt, you can add a default value as such:

>>> next((item for item in dicts if item["name"] == "Pam"), False)
{'name': 'Pam', 'age': 7}
>>> next((item for item in dicts if item["name"] == "Sam"), False)
False
>>>

Answer 2

One simple way using list comprehensions is , if l is the list

l = [
{"name": "Tom", "age": 10},
{"name": "Mark", "age": 5},
{"name": "Pam", "age": 7}
]

then

[d['age'] for d in l if d['name']=='Tom']

Answer 3

You can use a generator expression:

>>> dicts = [
...     { "name": "Tom", "age": 10 },
...     { "name": "Mark", "age": 5 },
...     { "name": "Pam", "age": 7 },
...     { "name": "Dick", "age": 12 }
... ]

>>> next(item for item in dicts if item["name"] == "Pam")
{'age': 7, 'name': 'Pam'}

If you need to handle the item not being there, then you can do what user Matt suggested in his comment and provide a default using a slightly different API:

next((item for item in dicts if item["name"] == "Pam"), None)

And to find the index of the item, rather than the item itself, you can enumerate() the list:

next((i for i, item in enumerate(dicts) if item["name"] == "Pam"), None)

Answer 4

Most (if not all) implementations proposed here have two flaws:

• They assume only one key to be passed for searching, while it may be interesting to have more for complex dict
• They assume all keys passed for searching exist in the dicts, hence they don't deal correctly with KeyError occuring when it is not.

An updated proposition:

def find_first_in_list(objects, **kwargs):
    return next((obj for obj in objects if
                 len(set(obj.keys()).intersection(kwargs.keys())) > 0 and
                 all([obj[k] == v for k, v in kwargs.items() if k in obj.keys()])),
                None)

Maybe not the most pythonic, but at least a bit more failsafe.

Usage:

>>> obj1 = find_first_in_list(list_of_dict, name='Pam', age=7)
>>> obj2 = find_first_in_list(list_of_dict, name='Pam', age=27)
>>> obj3 = find_first_in_list(list_of_dict, name='Pam', address='nowhere')
>>> 
>>> print(obj1, obj2, obj3)
{"name": "Pam", "age": 7}, None, {"name": "Pam", "age": 7}

The gist.

Answer 5

This is a general way of searching a value in a list of dictionaries:

def search_dictionaries(key, value, list_of_dictionaries):
    return [element for element in list_of_dictionaries if element[key] == value]

Answer 6

My first thought would be that you might want to consider creating a dictionary of these dictionaries ... if, for example, you were going to be searching it more a than small number of times.

However that might be a premature optimization. What would be wrong with:

def get_records(key, store=dict()):
    '''Return a list of all records containing name==key from our store
    '''
    assert key is not None
    return [d for d in store if d['name']==key]