Question

If I have a series of lists in a dictionary (for example):

{'Name': ['Thomas', 'Steven', 'Pauly D'], 'Age': [30, 50, 29]}

and I want to find the strings position so I can then get the same position from the other list.

So e.g.

if x = 'Thomas' #is in position 2:
    y = dictionary['Age'][2]

Answer 1

i = dictionary['Name'].index('Thomas')
y = dictionary['Age'][i]

However, index performs a linear search, which could be slow for a large list. In other cases similar to this, I’ve used a pattern like this:

Person = collections.namedtuple('Person', ['Name', 'Age'])
dictionary = {'Thomas': Person('Thomas', 30), 'Steven': Person('Steven', 50), 'Pauly D': Person('Pauly D', 29)}

You could do the same thing with a dict if you needed the records to be different length. Either way, storing it like this will help accessing records be faster.