Most efficient way to search in list of dicts

Question

I have the following list of dicts.

people = [
{\'name\': \"Tom\", \'age\': 10},
{\'name\': \"Mark\", \'age\': 5},
{\'name\': \"Pam\", \'age\': 7}
]
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Answer 1

Doing a quick timeit on the functions show that using filter seems to be the fastest of all the methods

%timeit filter(lambda person: person['name'] == 'Pam', people)

1000000 loops, best of 3: 263 ns per loop

• Using next produces a time of 731ns
• Using the search method produces a time of 361ns
• And lastly the seach_dictionaries uses 811ns

Answer 2

If you are searching for a single item then this is the "best" approach

def search(name):
    for p in people:
        if p['name'] == name:
            return p

All the other implementations will iterate over all the items in the list, whereas this one will stop once the item is found