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

You want to use two keys independently, so you have two choices:

1. Store the data redundantly with two dicts as {'banana' : {'blue' : 4, ...}, .... } and {'blue': {'banana':4, ...} ...}. Then, searching and sorting is easy but you have to make sure you modify the dicts together.

2. Store it just one dict, and then write functions that iterate over them eg.:

   d = {'banana' : {'blue' : 4, 'yellow':6}, 'apple':{'red':1} }
   
   blueFruit = [(fruit,d[fruit]['blue']) if d[fruit].has_key('blue') for fruit in d.keys()]