Which is the best approach for searching the dictionary items?

Question

We can search for the list of dictionaries using the below some approaches, Can one please help me, which one is the memory efficient approach to use?

Provided that:

• names are unique in the list
• There will be definitely a name in each dictionary.

Where as:

items = [list_of_dicts]
name_to_b_searched = "some_name"

1 direct return from the for loop

def get_by_name(self, name_to_be_searched):
    for i in items:
        if i['name'] == name_to_be_searched:
              return i

2 Break from the for loop and return found dictionary

def get_by_name(self, name_to_be_searched):
    found = None
    for i in items:
        if i['name'] == name_to_be_searched:
              found = i
              break 
    return found

3 A generator function

def get_by_name(self, name_to_be_searched):
    for i in items:
        if i['name'] == name_to_be_searched:
              yield i

4 An inline generator

get_by_name =next(i for i in items if i['name'] == name_to_be_searched, None)

Sometimes I could have a huge csv records (in items), so was thinking which approach would be better to search a record. OR if there is any other approach you would recommend please let me know.

Answer 1

None of the above.

OR if there is any other approach you would recommend please let me know.

The whole point of using dictionaries is that you don't need to search anything and can access everything in O(1) (on average) instead of the O(n) in all of your suggestions.

• names are unique in the list
• There will be definitely a name in each dictionary.

So, instead of using a list of dictionaries, use a dictionary of dictionaries using the name as the outer key.

Instead of

items = [{'name': 'a', 'age': 22, ...},
         {'name': 'b', 'age': 30, ...}]

you should have

items = {'a': {'age': 22, ...},
         'b': {'age': 30, ...}}

Now you can access each dictionary directly by using the name.

name = 'b'
print(items[name]['age'])
#  30

No loops, no searches, O(1) access.