Question

I’m working with a list of dict objects that looks like this (the order of the objects differs):

[
    {'name': 'Foo', 'score': 1},
    {'name': 'Bar', 'score': 2},
    {'name': 'Foo', 'score': 3},
    {'name': 'Bar', 'score': 3},
    {'name': 'Foo', 'score': 2},
    {'name': 'Baz', 'score': 2},
    {'name': 'Baz', 'score': 1},
    {'name': 'Bar', 'score': 1}
]

What I want to do is remove duplicate names, keeping only the one of each name that has the highest 'score'. The results from the above list would be:

[
    {'name': 'Baz', 'score': 2},
    {'name': 'Foo', 'score': 3},
    {'name': 'Bar', 'score': 3}
]

I’m not sure which pattern to use here (aside from a seemingly idiotic loop that keeps checking if the current dict‘s 'name' is in the list already and then checking if its 'score' is higher than the existing one’s 'score'.

Answer 1

One way to do that is:

data = collections.defaultdict(list)
for i in my_list:
    data[i['name']].append(i['score'])
output = [{'name': i, 'score': max(j)} for i,j in data.items()]

so output will be:

[{'score': 2, 'name': 'Baz'},
 {'score': 3, 'name': 'Foo'},
 {'score': 3, 'name': 'Bar'}]