Accessing Python dict values with the key start characters

Question

I was wondering: would it be possible to access dict values with uncomplete keys (as long as there are not more than one entry for a given string)? For example:

my_dict = {'name': 'Klauss', 'age': 26, 'Date of birth': '15th july'} print my_dict['Date'] >> '15th july' 

Is this possible? How could it be done?

Answer 1

You can't do such directly with dict[keyword], you've to iterate through the dict and match each key against the keyword and return the corresponding value if the keyword is found. This is going to be an O(N) operation.

>>> my_dict = {'name': 'Klauss', 'age': 26, 'Date of birth': '15th july'} >>> next(v for k,v in my_dict.items() if 'Date' in k) '15th july' 

To get all such values use a list comprehension:

>>> [ v for k,v in my_dict.items() if 'Date' in k] ['15th july'] 

use str.startswith if you want only those values whose keys starts with 'Date':

>>> next( v for k,v in my_dict.items() if k.startswith('Date')) '15th july' >>> [ v for k,v in my_dict.items() if k.startswith('Date')] ['15th july'] 

Answer 2

not the best solution, can be improved (overide getitem)

class mydict(dict):     def __getitem__(self, value):         keys = [k for k in self.keys() if value in k]         key = keys[0] if keys else None         return self.get(key)   my_dict = mydict({'name': 'Klauss', 'age': 26, 'Date of birth': '15th july'}) print(my_dict['Date'])# returns 15th july