Python 3: Find an element in a list inside a dictionary

Question

houses={'apartment':15, 'penthouse':35, 'others':[20,5,70]}

what I need is to check and then find 20 for example.

been trying for hours.
would be great if you could provide and explanation and multiple solutions.
thanks in advance.

You could use `any`: `any(20 in v for k, v in houses.items()` — Arthur Tacca, Mar 29 '17 at 15:56
I missed a close bracket in my last comment, it should be: `any(20 in v for k, v in houses.items())` — Arthur Tacca, Mar 29 '17 at 16:13
thank you alfasin. it works. but can I not find what I want in general?. what if I don`t know that 20 is in another list in the dictionary?. — nightroad, Mar 29 '17 at 18:09
@ArthurTacca it does't work consistently. once I get a True and the next I get `TypeError: argument of type 'int' is not iterable`. — nightroad, Mar 29 '17 at 18:49
@nightroad I didn't notice that some of the values are just lone values. I've posted an answer that takes it into account. But if you control the code that builds `houses` in the first place, I suggest you make all the values lists, even if they only have one item in them, and use the code in my earlier comment; that would be cleaner. — Arthur Tacca, Mar 30 '17 at 11:06

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:30

1

Your houses is a dictionary. It is missing a } though. Its others key is a list, so you can access its first item like so: print (houses['others'][0]). If you need to iterate over the keys and values, there are several ways as demonstrated in this link:Iterating over dict values . A basic version is like this:

houses={'apartment':15, 'penthouse':35, 'others':[20,5,70]}
bool = False
for (k,v) in houses.items():
    if type(v)==list:
        if 20 in v:
            bool = True
            print(k,v)
    if v == 20:
        bool = true
        print(k,v)
print(bool)

edited May 23 '17 at 10:30

Community

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answered Mar 29 '17 at 03:40

Treefish Zhang

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the braces is already in my code. just missed it here. but thank you. adding [0] is't helpful tho, because I need to find the data before I know where is its location. – nightroad Mar 29 '17 at 18:07
Dictionary keys and values can be accessed like in this link: https://www.codecademy.com/en/forum_questions/50721fce7c7091000201e56a where the author 'flatten a list using a listcomp with two 'for'' : https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/datastructures.html – Treefish Zhang Mar 29 '17 at 19:38

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 30 '17 at 11:05

This will look over all the entries in houses, and look for search in the values. For each value, if it's not a collection, it will compare directly.

def is_in_house(search, house):
    for v in houses.values():
        try:
            if search in v:
                return True
        except TypeError:
            if v == search:
                return True
    return False

Python 3: Find an element in a list inside a dictionary

2 Answers2