Tamer Higazi wrote: > Hi Dave! > > You were absolutely right. > I don't want to iterate the entire dict to get me the key/values > > Let us say this dict would have 20.000 entries, but I want only those > with "Aa" to be grabed. > Those starting with these 2 letters would be only 5 or 6 then it would > take a lot of time. > > In which way would you prefer to store the data, and which functions or > methods would you use effectively to accomplish this task ?
Well, Dave already gave one approach: [Dave Angel] > For example if you stored all the keys in a sorted list you could use > bisect. See also http://docs.python.org/dev/library/bisect.html Another option would be to use a database. Assuming the table 'lookup' has two columns 'key' and 'value' you'd get the matching rows with select key, value from lookup where key like 'Aa%'; A lightweight database that comes with Python is sqlite: http://docs.python.org/dev/library/sqlite3.html http://www.sqlite.org/ -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
