Filter dict to contain only certain keys?

Question

I\'ve got a dict that has a whole bunch of entries. I\'m only interested in a select few of them. Is there an easy way to prune all the other ones out?

Answer 1

Based on the accepted answer by delnan.

What if one of your wanted keys aren't in the old_dict? The delnan solution will throw a KeyError exception that you can catch. If that's not what you need maybe you want to:

1. only include keys that excists both in the old_dict and your set of wanted_keys.

   old_dict = {'name':"Foobar", 'baz':42}
   wanted_keys = ['name', 'age']
   new_dict = {k: old_dict[k] for k in set(wanted_keys) & set(old_dict.keys())}
   
   >>> new_dict
   {'name': 'Foobar'}
   

2. have a default value for keys that's not set in old_dict.

   default = None
   new_dict = {k: old_dict[k] if k in old_dict else default for k in wanted_keys}
   
   >>> new_dict
   {'age': None, 'name': 'Foobar'}
   

Answer 2

Constructing a new dict:

dict_you_want = { your_key: old_dict[your_key] for your_key in your_keys }

Uses dictionary comprehension.

If you use a version which lacks them (ie Python 2.6 and earlier), make it dict((your_key, old_dict[your_key]) for ...). It's the same, though uglier.

Note that this, unlike jnnnnn's version, has stable performance (depends only on number of your_keys) for old_dicts of any size. Both in terms of speed and memory. Since this is a generator expression, it processes one item at a time, and it doesn't looks through all items of old_dict.

Removing everything in-place:

unwanted = set(keys) - set(your_dict)
for unwanted_key in unwanted: del your_dict[unwanted_key]

Answer 3

If we want to make a new dictionary with selected keys removed, we can make use of dictionary comprehension
For example:

d = {
'a' : 1,
'b' : 2,
'c' : 3
}
x = {key:d[key] for key in d.keys() - {'c', 'e'}} # Python 3
y = {key:d[key] for key in set(d.keys()) - {'c', 'e'}} # Python 2.*
# x is {'a': 1, 'b': 2}
# y is {'a': 1, 'b': 2}