On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 11:55 AM Christopher Barker <pythonchb@gmail.com> wrote:

> smaller_dict = dict(islice(large_dict.items(), 0, 255))
well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course. But really, you think it's pretty to import itertools, then make a function call, for what's very much a slicing operation?

In your post that introduced that,that is *exactly* what I thought of when you first described the issue, before I read down to your solution. It took a fraction of a second to think of for me. It *is* slightly verbose. What do you think about this in current Python:

>>> large = {i:i**2 for i in range(1000)}

>>> import sys
>>> from itertools import islice
>>> class IterSlicer:
... def __getitem__(self, what):
... it, sl = what
... return islice(it, sl.start or 0, sl.stop or sys.maxsize, sl.step or 1)
...
>>> IS = IterSlicer()
>>> dict(IS[large.items(), 3:10:2])
{3: 9, 5: 25, 7: 49, 9: 81}

>>> from itertools import count
>>> set(IS[count(), 10:100:9])
{64, 37, 73, 10, 46, 82, 19, 55, 91, 28}

Potentially IterSlicer, or IS, could live in itertools (or more likely more-itertools) just to provide a short way to use slice notation with an arbitrary iterable... not limited to dict.items().

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