bullockbefriending bard schrieb: > i have a large collection of python objects, each of which contains an > integer 6-tuple as part of its data payload. what i need to be able to > do is select only those objects which meet a simple tuple element > wildcard matching criterion. e.g. given the following python objects: > > object A includes tuple (1,2,3,4,5,6) > object B includes tuple (1,4,4,4,11,1) > object C includes tuple (1,3,9,1,1,1) > > all tuples are unique. for what it's worth, the values in each field > are independent of the other fields and range from 1 to 14. although > 'large', my collection is sparse cf. the 14^6 possible tuples. > > i want to search on *one only* tuple field/value. if my search > criterion is (*,*,*,4,*,*), then i want to find object A and object B. > if (1,*,*,*,*,*), i want to find objects A, B, and C, etc. i will only > ever specify an integer match for one tuple field. > > i can think of some naive approaches, but is there an elegant way to > do this?
Depends on what you find elegant. Are the criteria runtime-specified, and is anything other than the * allowerd, e.g. [1,3,8]? IMHO the best thing is to create a filter-function that you then use to... filter :) Like this: def create_filter_predicate(criteria): """ criteria is an iterable containing either an '*' or a list of comma-separated integers """ sub_preds = [] for i, sub_crit in enumerate(criteria): if sub_crit == "*": continue matching_set = set(int(n) for n in sub_crit.split(",")) sub_preds.append((i, matching_set)) def predicate(o): t = o.my_tuple for i, ms in sub_preds: if not t[i] in ms: return False return True return predicate Diez -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list