Iterating Dictionaries in a Function

[David M. Cooke]

At some point, "Delaney, Timothy C (Timothy)" <tdelaney at avaya.com> wrote:

> Also, since you're using a non-changing dictionary, it's best to only
> create it once.
>
>     OPTIONS = {'a': 1, 'rty': 4, 'er': 2}
>
>     def findx (st):
>         try:
>             item = OPTIONS[st.lower()]
>         except KeyError:
>             print 'Item not found: %s' % (st,)
>             return None
>         else:
>             print 'Item found: %s %s' % (st, item,)
>             return item
>
> or even better, don't bother catching the exception (I presume you're
> only doing it for debugging, as with the printing):
>
>     def findx (st):
>         return OPTIONS[st.lower()]
>
> which of course becomes
>
>     OPTIONS[st.lower()]

Or, without exceptions, and returning None like before,

def findx(st):
    return OPTIONS.get(st.lower(), None)

-- 
|>|\/|<
/--------------------------------------------------------------------------\
|David M. Cooke
|cookedm(at)physics(dot)mcmaster(dot)ca