Question

I have a 2 dimensinal dictionary representing people. Here’s an example of it:

>>> people = {'pk1':{'firstname':'Brian', 'age':42}, 'pk2':{'firstname':'Alex',
'age':50}}

As can be seen, there is a primary key in each entry. Each one then points to a dictionary containing information about a specific person. How do I search the overall ‘people’ dictionary to return me all people who have the age 42?

Answer 1

If you want to use a more generic function that can perform various searches you can use something like:

def findPeople(people, filter):
    ret = {}
    for k, v in people.items():
        if filter(v):
            ret[k] = v
    return ret

Then for age == 42 you can call it like:

findPeople( people, lambda x: x['age'] == 42 );