Question

I have a data structure which is a collection of tuples like this:

things = ( (123, 1, "Floogle"), (154, 33, "Blurgle"), (156, 55, "Blarg") )

The first and third elements are each unique to the collection.

What I want to do is retrieve a specific tuple by referring to the third value, eg:

>>> my_thing = things.get( value(3) == "Blurgle" )
(154, 33, "Blurgle")

There must be a better way than writing a loop to check each value one by one!

Answer 1

If things is a list, and you know that the third element is uniqe, what about a list comprehension?

>> my_thing = [x for x in things if x[2]=="Blurgle"][0]

Although under the hood, I assume that goes through all the values and checks them individually. If you don’t like that, what about changing the my_things structure so that it’s a dict and using either the first or the third value as the key?