Python list of dictionaries search

python search dictionary
Hellnar picture Hellnar · Dec 28, 2011 · Viewed 613.1k times · Source

Assume I have this:

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

and by searching "Pam" as name, I want to retrieve the related dictionary: {name: "Pam", age: 7}

How to achieve this ?

Answer

Frédéric Hamidi picture Frédéric Hamidi · Dec 28, 2011

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)

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