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What would be the most elegant and efficient way of finding/returning the first list item that matches a certain criterion?
For example, if I have a list of objects and I would like to get the first object of those with attribute obj.val==5. I could of course use list comprehension, but that would incur O(n) and if n is large, it’s wasteful. I could also use a loop with break once the criterion was met, but I thought there could be a more pythonic/elegant solution.
If you don’t have any other indexes or sorted information for your objects, then you will have to iterate until such an object is found:
This is however faster than a complete list comprehension. Compare these two:
The first one needs 5.75ms, the second one 58.3µs (100 times faster because the loop 100 times shorter).