Python: Tuples/dictionaries as keys, select, sort

Question

Suppose I have quantities of fruits of different colors, e.g., 24 blue bananas, 12 green apples, 0 blue strawberries and so on. I\'d like to organize them in a data structur

Answer 1

A dictionary probably isn't what you should be using in this case. A more full featured library would be a better alternative. Probably a real database. The easiest would be sqlite. You can keep the whole thing in memory by passing in the string ':memory:' instead of a filename.

If you do want to continue down this path, you can do it with the extra attributes in the key or the value. However a dictionary can't be the key to a another dictionary, but a tuple can. The docs explain what's allowable. It must be an immutable object, which includes strings, numbers and tuples that contain only strings and numbers (and more tuples containing only those types recursively...).

You could do your first example with d = {('apple', 'red') : 4}, but it'll be very hard to query for what you want. You'd need to do something like this:

#find all apples
apples = [d[key] for key in d.keys() if key[0] == 'apple']

#find all red items
red = [d[key] for key in d.keys() if key[1] == 'red']

#the red apple
redapples = d[('apple', 'red')]