Question

Question:

How best* can I store and access fixed U.S. State attributes in my python program?

* the most reasonable combination of clear, maintainable, quick and idiomatic

Background info:

I’m creating a python/flask app that regularly accesses U.S. State attributes for various displays and sorting. An example of the attributes:

State: South Carolina

• Proper Name: South Carolina
• Abbreviation: SC
• url friendly slug: south_carolina
• Region: southeast

Currently, I’m storing some of this information in dictionaries (SO question regarding this). However, it seem more unwieldy as more attributes are added.

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Some options I’ve considered

• Adding more dictionaries
  • Seems clumsy
• Use a database
  • I’m new to databases. I’m happy to learn, but I’m not clear this is the best approach. Also, I’m concerned this would be overkill.
• Add a State Class
  • Seems a little inelegant to create 50 State objects just to query a few attributes.

Thanks very much for your time.

Edit: Added explanation of what best means.

Answer 1

I ended up using a database to solve this problem. I considered a bunch of options and it seems to be the most reasonable in terms of effort, complexity and long-term maintenance.

Trying to make some other solution solve my problem here would really only be a crude recreation of database functionality anyhow e.g. dictionaries on dictionaries on dictionaries…

For those wondering, on this particular Flask app I went with Flask-SQLAlchemy on top of a sqlite3 database.