Python : List of dict, if exists increment a dict value, if not append a new dict

Question

I would like do something like that.

list_of_urls = [\'http://www.google.fr/\', \'http://www.google.fr/\', 
                \'http://www.google.cn/\', \'http         


        

Answer 1

To do it exactly your way? You could use the for...else structure

for url in list_of_urls:
    for url_dict in urls:
        if url_dict['url'] == url:
            url_dict['nbr'] += 1
            break
    else:
        urls.append(dict(url=url, nbr=1))

But it is quite inelegant. Do you really have to store the visited urls as a LIST? If you sort it as a dict, indexed by url string, for example, it would be way cleaner:

urls = {'http://www.google.fr/': dict(url='http://www.google.fr/', nbr=1)}

for url in list_of_urls:
    if url in urls:
        urls[url]['nbr'] += 1
    else:
        urls[url] = dict(url=url, nbr=1)

A few things to note in that second example:

• see how using a dict for urls removes the need for going through the whole urls list when testing for one single url. This approach will be faster.
• Using dict( ) instead of braces makes your code shorter
• using list_of_urls, urls and url as variable names make the code quite hard to parse. It's better to find something clearer, such as urls_to_visit, urls_already_visited and current_url. I know, it's longer. But it's clearer.

And of course I'm assuming that dict(url='http://www.google.fr', nbr=1) is a simplification of your own data structure, because otherwise, urls could simply be:

urls = {'http://www.google.fr':1}

for url in list_of_urls:
    if url in urls:
        urls[url] += 1
    else:
        urls[url] = 1

Which can get very elegant with the defaultdict stance:

urls = collections.defaultdict(int)
for url in list_of_urls:
    urls[url] += 1