Retrieving a specific object from a list?

[Terry Reedy]

Jeremiah Dodds wrote:
> I've been looking over some of my code, and I've found something I do 
> that has a bit of a smell to it. I've searched the group and docs, and 
> haven't found much of anything that solves this particular problem, 
> although I may just not be searching correctly.
> 
> Anyhow, I find that often I'll have a list of objects of some sort that 
> I want to operate on. Most of the time, I'll want to operate on the 
> entire list, but sometimes I'll want to operate on just one element, or 
> retrieve just one element, and I end up with code something like the 
> following:
> 
> items = [Foo(), Foo(), ... Foo()]
> 
> a_item = [x for x in items if x.bar == some_value][0]
> another_item = [x for x in items if x.baz == some_other_value][0]
> 
> This doesn't seem correct at all, looping over the entire list to create 
> a list of one element and then pulling that item out. Any advice?

for x in items:
   if x.baz == some_other_value: break