Question

Continued from this stackoverflow question.
I have the following data structure:

data = [
  {'site': 'Stackoverflow', 'id': 1},
  {'site': 'Superuser', 'id': 2}, 
  {'site': 'Serverfault', 'id': 3}
]

I want to search all ‘site’ keys for a specific value, and return that dictionary’s ‘id’ value. For example, searching ‘Superuser’ should return 2:

>>> print find_id('Superuser')
2

When I tried using the referenced question’s solution, I received an error:

>>> if any(d['site'] == 'Superuser' for d in data): print d['Superuser']
... 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'd' is not defined
>>> if any(d['site'] == 'Superuser' for d in data): print data['Superuser']
... 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: list indices must be integers, not str

What’s the most pythonic way of doing this?

Answer 1

No tricks here. Just do:

def find_id(data, name):
    for d in data:
        if d['site'] == name:
            return d['id']