[Python-ideas] Enhancing dict.values

[Steve Dower]

Neat!

My bikeshed is coloured `dict.getmany(*keys, default=None)`, and while returning a namedtuple might be cool, an iterator is probably the way to go.

But +1 regardless of colour.

Top-posted from my Windows Phone

-----Original Message-----
From: "Koos Zevenhoven" <k7hoven at gmail.com>
Sent: ‎5/‎26/‎2016 22:27
To: "Ethan Furman" <ethan at stoneleaf.us>
Cc: "python-ideas" <python-ideas at python.org>
Subject: Re: [Python-ideas] Enhancing dict.values

On Fri, May 27, 2016 at 7:57 AM, Ethan Furman <ethan at stoneleaf.us> wrote:

On 05/26/2016 09:26 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

On Thursday, May 26, 2016, Steven D'Apranowrote:

On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 11:28:25PM +0100, Nathan Schneider wrote:



I think this is important enough to get a change in subject line, lest
it be lost in the dict unpacking thread.





Instead of special syntax, what if dict.values() returned a tuple

when given keys as arguments:


   partner_id, product_id, ship_to, product_ids = my_dict.values(
           'partner_id', 'product_id', 'ship_to', 'product_ids')

That avoids repeating the dict variable, at least. And as there is
dict.update(), I don't see the need for a new syntax for assigning to
multiple keys.


I like this idea. I think it beats the status quo:

+1


Interesting. It should probably have a different name. What type should
it return? Iterator? Sequence? It can't really be a ValuesView because
that class is just a view on the hash table. Even though you technically
*could* combine this functionality into values(), I don't think it would
be helpful to do so -- if only because of the surprising edge case where
if you were to pass it a list of keys to extract using **args, if the
list is empty, values() would default to its original behavior or
returning all keys, in hash table order.


Good point.  The time bomb would be even worse if sometimes the dict had the same number of elements as were being asked for, as then it would be an intermittent problem.

However, if we make a new method we could just as easily make a new function:

  def get_values_from(a_dict, keys=()):
      if not keys:
           raise an_error
      yield a_dict[k] for k in keys

Hmmm.  That could even be handy for a list/tuple:

  offset, name = get_values_from(a_list, [1, 7])

;)




​getitems(obj, subscripts) ?


We almost have this:


from operator import itemgetter


itemgetter(1,7)(a_list)



​-- Koos​


 
At any rate, the return type should be an iterator.

--
~Ethan~


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