Question

I have a list with objects of x type. Those objects have an attribute name.
I want to find if a string matchs any of those object names. If I would have a list with the object names I just would do if string in list, so I was wondering given the current situation if there is a way to do it without having to loop over the list.

Answer 1

Here’s another

dict( (o.name,o) for o in obj_list )[name]

The trick, though, is avoid creating a list obj_list in the first place.

Since you know that you’re going to fetch objects by the string value of an attribute, do not use a list, use a dictionary instead of a list.

A dictionary can be trivially “searched” for matching strings. It’s a better choice than a list.