I've declared a list of tuples that I would like to manipulate. I have a function that returns an option from the user. I would like to see if the user has entered any one of the keys 'A', 'W', 'K'. With a dictionary, I would say this: while option not in author.items() option = get_option(). How can I accomplish this with a list of tuples?
authors = [('A', "Aho"), ('W', "Weinberger"), ('K', "Kernighan")]
authors = [('A', "Aho"), ('W', "Weinberger"), ('K', "Kernighan")]
option = get_option()
while option not in (x[0] for x in authors):
option = get_option()
How this works :
(x[0] for x in authors) is an generator expression, this yield the [0]th element of each item one by one from authors list, and that element is then matched against the option. As soon as match is found it short-circuits and exits.
Generator expressions yield one item at a time, so are memory efficient.
zip(*iter)[0] solution.name = next(x[1] for x in authors if x[0] == option)How about something like
option in zip(*authors)[0]
We are using zip to essentially separate the letters from the words. Nevertheless, since we are dealing with a list of tuples, we must unpack it using *:
>>> zip(*authors)
[('A', 'W', 'K'), ('Aho', 'Weinberger', 'Kernighan')]
>>> zip(*authors)[0]
('A', 'W', 'K')
Then we simply use option in to test if option is contained in zip(*authors)[0].
zip will return a list of tuples, which you can then iterate over like any other iterable. That does mean that the syntax here is a bit incomplete, though.
There are good answers here that cover doing this operation with zip, but you don't have to do it like that - you can use an OrderedDict instead.
from collections import OrderedDict
authors = OrderedDict([('A', "Aho"), ('W', "Weinberger"), ('K', "Kernighan")])
Since it remembers its entry order, you can iterate over it without fear of getting odd or unusual orderings of your keys.
