CODEWITHSUNDEEP
python
Lostsoul
Lostsoul

Reputation: 26067

Is there a way to return/print list item without quotes or brackets?

Sorry if this is already mentioned somewhere(I couldn't find it).

I basically want to list an item from a list but its including quotes and brackets(which I don't want). Here's my data:

inputData = {'red':3, 'blue':1, 'green':2, 'organge':5}

Here's my class to find items either based on key or value.

class Lookup(dict):
    """
    a dictionary which can lookup value by key, or keys by value
    """
    def __init__(self, items=[]):
        """items can be a list of pair_lists or a dictionary"""
        dict.__init__(self, items)

    def get_key(self, value):
        """find the key(s) as a list given a value"""
        return [item[0] for item in self.items() if item[1] == value]

    def get_value(self, key):
        """find the value given a key"""
        return self[key]

it works fine except for the brackets.

print Lookup().get_key(2) # ['blue']  but I want it to just output blue

I know I can do this via replacing the bracket/quotes( LookupVariable.replace("'", "") ) but I was wondering if there was a more pythonic way of doing this.

Thanks.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 9976

Answers (2)

agf
agf

Reputation: 176980

Change 

return [item[0] for item in self.items() if item[1] == value]

to 

return next(item[0] for item in self.items() if item[1] == value)

Right now you're returning the result of a list comprehension -- a list. Instead, you want to return the first item returned by the equivalent generator expression -- that's what next does.

Edit: If you actually want multiple items, use Greg's answer -- but it sounds to me like you're only thinking about getting a single key -- this is a good way to do that.

If you want it to raise a StopIteration error if the value doesn't exist, leave it as above. If you want it to return something else instead (like None) do:

return next((item[0] for item in self.items() if item[1] == value), None)

Upvotes: 4

Greg Hewgill
Greg Hewgill

Reputation: 994877

You're printing the returned list value, which Python formats with brackets and quotes. To print just the first element from the list:

print Lookup.get_key(2)[0]

To print the elements of the list separated by commas:

print ", ".join(str(x) for x in Lookup.get_key(2))

or

print ", ".join(map(str, Lookup.get_key(2)))

Upvotes: 3

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