Question

I am trying to implement to search for a value in Python dictionary for specific key values (using regular expression as a key).

Example:

I have a Python dictionary which has values like:

{'account_0':123445,'seller_account':454545,'seller_account_0':454676, 'seller_account_number':3433343}

I need to search for values whose key has ‘seller_account’? I wrote a sample program but would like to know if something can be done better. Main reason is I am not sure of regular expression and miss out something (like how do I set re for key starting with ‘seller_account’):

#!usr/bin/python
import re
my_dict={'account_0':123445,'seller_account':454545,'seller_account_0':454676, 'seller_account_number':3433343}

reObj = re.compile('seller_account')

for key in my_dict.keys():
        if(reObj.match(key)):
                print key, my_dict[key]

~ home> python regular.py

seller_account_number 3433343
seller_account_0 454676
seller_account 454545

Answer 1

If you only need to check keys that are starting with "seller_account", you don’t need regex, just use startswith()

my_dict={'account_0':123445,'seller_account':454545,'seller_account_0':454676, 'seller_account_number':3433343}

for key, value in my_dict.iteritems():   # iter on both keys and values
        if key.startswith('seller_account'):
                print key, value

or in a one_liner way :

result = [(key, value) for key, value in my_dict.iteritems() if key.startswith("seller_account")]

NB: for a python 3.X use, replace iteritems() by items() and don’t forget to add () for print.