bullockbefriending bard schrieb: >> Instead of passing a wild-card tuple like (*,*,*,4,*,*) simply pass the >> integer you want to match and the position you want to match it in. > > for sure. that was more for expository purpose rather than how i was > planning to go about it. > > >> As a generator expression: >> >> (obj for obj in list_of_objects if obj.data[what] == where) > > above or equivalent list comprehension was what i had in mind as far > as linear search goes. and scanning the list like this will most > likely be 'good enough' performance-wise. however, partly just out of > curiosity, i was wondering if there is some kind of data structure > which might let me find all the matches a bit faster.
You can of course create a tree from the tuples, where the first level of nodes corresponds to the first attribute of the tuple and so forth. There are certainly cases where the speedup is tremendous - think of a single integer in the first criteria - but then the overall performance depends on the real-live queries. If lot's of wildcards are used, you might end up slower if the tree-walk takes more time than the C-implemented list-iteration will cost you. Diez -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
