G. Völkl wrote:
Hello,

I use a dictionary:

phone = {'mike':10,'sue':8,'john':3}

phone['mike']   --> 10

I want to know who has number 3?
3 -->  'john'

Note that you can have many keys with the same value: phone = {'mike':10,'sue':8,'john':3, 'jack': 3, 'helen' : 10}


How to get it in the python way ?

simplest way I could think of in 30': def key_from_value(aDict, target): return [key for key, value in aDict.items() if value==target]

key_from_value(phone, 3)
--> ['john', 'jack']

but this is a linear search, so not very efficient if phone is big.
Then you may want to maintain a reversed index:
(here again, simplest way I could think of)

def rev_index(aDict):
  r = {}
  for key, value in aDict.items():
    if r.has_key(value):
      r[value].append(key)
    else:
      r[value] = [key]
   return r
rev_phone = rev_index(phone)
rev_phone
--> {8: ['sue'], 10: ['helen', 'mike'], 3: ['john', 'jack']}

{8: ['sue'], 10: ['helen', 'mike'], 3: ['john', 'jack']}

rev_phone[3]
--> ['john', 'jack']

But now you've got another problem : you need to update the reversed index each time you modify the dictionary... Which would lead to writing a class extending dict, maintaining a reversed index, and exposing extra methods to handle this.

But there may be a better way (someone else ?)

--
bruno desthuilliers
python -c "print '@'.join(['.'.join([w[::-1] for w in p.split('.')]) for p in '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'.split('@')])"
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

Reply via email to