pythondictionaryfilter

How to filter a dictionary according to an arbitrary condition function?

I have a dictionary of points, say:

>>> points={'a':(3,4), 'b':(1,2), 'c':(5,5), 'd':(3,3)}

I want to create a new dictionary with all the points whose x and y value is smaller than 5, i.e. points 'a', 'b' and 'd'.

According to the the book, each dictionary has the items() function, which returns a list of (key, pair) tuple:

>>> points.items()
[('a', (3, 4)), ('c', (5, 5)), ('b', (1, 2)), ('d', (3, 3))]

So I have written this:

>>> for item in [i for i in points.items() if i[1][0]<5 and i[1][1]<5]:
...     points_small[item[0]]=item[1]
...
>>> points_small
{'a': (3, 4), 'b': (1, 2), 'd': (3, 3)}

Is there a more elegant way? I was expecting Python to have some super-awesome dictionary.filter(f) function...

Solution

  • You can use a dict comprehension:

    {k: v for k, v in points.items() if v[0] < 5 and v[1] < 5}

    And in Python 2, starting from 2.7:

    {k: v for k, v in points.iteritems() if v[0] < 5 and v[1] < 5}