Slicing a dictionary

Question

I have a dictionary, and would like to pass a part of it to a function, that part being given by a list (or tuple) of keys. Like so:

# the dictionary
d = {1:         


        

Answer 1

You should be iterating over the tuple and checking if the key is in the dict not the other way around, if you don't check if the key exists and it is not in the dict you are going to get a key error:

print({k:d[k] for k in l if k in d})

Some timings:

 {k:d[k] for k in set(d).intersection(l)}

In [22]: %%timeit                        
l = xrange(100000)
{k:d[k] for k in l}
   ....: 
100 loops, best of 3: 11.5 ms per loop

In [23]: %%timeit                        
l = xrange(100000)
{k:d[k] for k in set(d).intersection(l)}
   ....: 
10 loops, best of 3: 20.4 ms per loop

In [24]: %%timeit                        
l = xrange(100000)
l = set(l)                              
{key: d[key] for key in d.viewkeys() & l}
   ....: 
10 loops, best of 3: 24.7 ms per

In [25]: %%timeit                        

l = xrange(100000)
{k:d[k] for k in l if k in d}
   ....: 
100 loops, best of 3: 17.9 ms per loop

I don't see how {k:d[k] for k in l} is not readable or elegant and if all elements are in d then it is pretty efficient.