Searching a SortedList of a class

I have a SortedList of a class, such as...

from typing import List
from sortedcontainers import SortedList

class Supplier:
    def __init__(self, name: str, id: int, sap_id: int):
        self.Name = name
        self.Id = id
        self.SapId = sap_id

class Data:
    def __init__(self):
        self.suppliers = SortedList(key=lambda x: x.Name.lower())

I want to be able to search through the SortedList based on the supplier name

Such as...

    # Part of the Data class
    def find_supplier(self, name:str):
        index = self.suppliers.bisect_left(name)
        if index != len(self.suppliers) and self.suppliers[index].Name.lower() == name.lower():
            return self.suppliers[index]
        
        return None

However this does not work as the bisect_left passes a str, and it is expected a Supplier. I can fix this by creating a temporary supplier and adding the name to it, and then searching that way, such as...

    # Part of the Data class
    def find_supplier(self, name:str):
        temporary_supplier = Supplier(name, 0, 0)
        index = self.suppliers.bisect_left(temporary_supplier)
        if index != len(self.suppliers) and self.suppliers[index].Name.lower() == name.lower():
            return self.suppliers[index]
        
        return None

However it feels like an ugly way of doing it. Is there another option that does not rely on me creating my own binary search function?

Solution

Instead of using a custom key function for SortedList or creating a temporary Supplier when calling bisect_left, a cleaner approach may be to make Supplier comparable by defining one of the rich comparison methods and making it accept a string as the other operand:

class Supplier:
    def __init__(self, name: str):
        self.Name = name

    def __repr__(self):
        return self.Name

    def __lt__(self, other):
        if isinstance(other, str):
            return self.Name < other
        return self.Name < other.Name

so that:

class Data:
    def __init__(self):
        self.suppliers = SortedList()

    def find_supplier(self, name: str):
        index = self.suppliers.bisect_left(name)
        if index != len(self.suppliers) and self.suppliers[index].Name.lower() == name.lower():
            return self.suppliers[index]

d = Data()
d.suppliers.update([Supplier('B'), Supplier('A')])
print(d.suppliers)
print(d.find_supplier('A'))

outputs:

SortedList([A, B])
A