Hashtable/dictionary/map lookup with regular expressions

Question

I\'m trying to figure out if there\'s a reasonably efficient way to perform a lookup in a dictionary (or a hash, or a map, or whatever your favorite language calls it) where the

Answer 1

What about the following:

class redict(dict):
def __init__(self, d):
    dict.__init__(self, d)

def __getitem__(self, regex):
    r = re.compile(regex)
    mkeys = filter(r.match, self.keys())
    for i in mkeys:
        yield dict.__getitem__(self, i)

It's basically a subclass of the dict type in Python. With this you can supply a regular expression as a key, and the values of all keys that match this regex are returned in an iterable fashion using yield.

With this you can do the following:

>>> keys = ["a", "b", "c", "ab", "ce", "de"]
>>> vals = range(0,len(keys))
>>> red = redict(zip(keys, vals))
>>> for i in red[r"^.e$"]:
...     print i
... 
5
4
>>>