Find dictionary items whose key matches a substring

Question

I have a large dictionary constructed like so:

programs['New York'] = 'some values...' 
programs['Port Authority of New York'] = 'some values...' 
programs['New York City'] = 'some values...'
...

How can I return all elements of programs whose key mentions “new york” (case insensitive)? In the example above, I would want to get all the three items.

EDIT: The dictionary is quite large and expected to get larger over time.

Asked By: Abid A

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Source

Answer 1

[value for key, value in programs.items() if 'new york' in key.lower()]

Answered By: mensi

Answer 2

An iteritems and a generator expression will do this:

d={'New York':'some values',
    'Port Authority of New York':'some more values',
    'New York City':'lots more values'}

print list(v for k,v in d.iteritems() if 'new york' in k.lower())

Output:

['lots more values', 'some more values', 'some values']

Answered By: the wolf

Answer 3

You could generate all substrings ahead of time, and map them to their respective keys.

#generates all substrings of s.
def genSubstrings(s):
    #yield all substrings that contain the first character of the string
    for i in range(1, len(s)+1):
        yield s[:i]
    #yield all substrings that don't contain the first character
    if len(s) > 1:
        for j in genSubstrings(s[1:]):
            yield j

keys = ["New York", "Port Authority of New York", "New York City"]
substrings = {}
for key in keys:
    for substring in genSubstrings(key):
        if substring not in substrings:
            substrings[substring] = []
        substrings[substring].append(key)

Then you can query substrings to get the keys that contain that substring:

>>>substrings["New York"]
['New York', 'Port Authority of New York', 'New York City']
>>> substrings["of New York"]
['Port Authority of New York']

Pros:

getting keys by substring is as fast as accessing a dictionary.

Cons:

Generating substrings incurs a one-time cost at the beginning of your program, taking time proportional to the number of keys in programs.
substrings will grow approximately linearly with the number of keys in programs, increasing the memory usage of your script.
genSubstrings has O(n^2) performance in relation to the size of your key. For example, “Port Authority of New York” generates 351 substrings.

Answered By: Kevin

Answer 4

You should use the brute force method given by mensi until it proves to be too slow.

Here’s something that duplicates the data to give a speedier lookup. It only works if your search is for whole words only – i.e. you’ll never need to match on “New Yorks Best Bagels” because “york” and “yorks” are different words.

words = {}
for key in programs.keys():
    for w in key.split():
        w = w.lower()
        if w not in words:
            words[w] = set()
        words[w].add(key)


def lookup(search_string, words, programs):
    result_keys = None
    for w in search_string.split():
        w = w.lower()
        if w not in words:
            return []
        result_keys = words[w] if result_keys is None else result_keys.intersection(words[w])
    return [programs[k] for k in result_keys]

If the words have to be in sequence (i.e. “York New” shouldn’t match) you can apply the brute-force method to the short list of result_keys.

Answered By: Mark Ransom

Answer 5

This is usually called a relaxed dictionary and it can be implemented efficiently using a suffix tree.

The memory used by this approach is linear over the keys, which is optimal, and the time of search is linear over the substring length you are searching, which is also optimal.

I have found this library in python that implements this.

https://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dyoo/python/suffix_trees/

Answered By: jordi

Find dictionary items whose key matches a substring

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