Python find object in a list

Question

I have a list of people:

[
    {'name' : 'John', 'wins' : 10 },
    {'name' : 'Sally', 'wins' : 0 },
    {'name' : 'Fred', 'wins' : 3 },
    {'name' : 'Mary', 'wins' : 6 }
]

I am adding wins using a list of names (['Fred', 'Mary', 'Sally']). I don't know if the name is in the list of people already, and I need to insert a new record if not. Currently I'm doing the following:

name = 'John'
person = None
pidx = None
for p in people_list:
    if p['name'] == name:
        person = p
        pidx = people_list.index(p)
        break
if person is None:
    person = {'name' : name, 'wins' : 0}
person['wins'] += 1
if pidx is None:
    people_list.append(person)
else
    people_list[pidx] = person

Is there a better way to do this with a list? Given that I'm saving this to MongoDB I can't use a dict as it will save as an object and I want to use native array functions for sorting and mapping that aren't available for objects.

Answer 1

I'm assuming here that you don't want to use any structure other than the list. Your code should work, although you unnecessarily write the dictionary back to the list after updating it. Dictionaries are copied by reference, so once you update it, it stays updated in the list. After a little housekeeping, your code could look like this:

def add_win(people_list, name):
    person = find_person(people_list, name)
    person['wins'] += 1

def find_person(people_list, name):
    for person in people_list:
        if person['name'] == name:
            return person
    person = {'name': name, 'wins': 0}
    people_list.append(person)
    return person