Essential Books

Searching nested sequences

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Searching in nested sequences like a list of tuple requires an approach like searching the keys for values in dict but needs customized functions.

The index of the outermost sequence if the value was found in the sequence: 

def outer_index(nested_sequence, value):
    return next(index for index, inner in enumerate(nested_sequence) 
                      for item in inner 
                      if item == value)

alist_of_tuples = [(4, 5, 6), (3, 1, 'a'), (7, 0, 4.3)]
outer_index(alist_of_tuples, 'a')  # 1
outer_index(alist_of_tuples, 4.3)  # 2

or the index of the outer and inner sequence: 

def outer_inner_index(nested_sequence, value):
    return next((oindex, iindex) for oindex, inner in enumerate(nested_sequence) 
                                 for iindex, item in enumerate(inner) 
                                 if item == value)

outer_inner_index(alist_of_tuples, 'a') # (1, 2)
alist_of_tuples[1][2]  # 'a'

outer_inner_index(alist_of_tuples, 7)   # (2, 0)
alist_of_tuples[2][0]  # 7

In general (not always) using next and a generator expression with conditions to find the first occurrence of the searched value is the most efficient approach.

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Searching:
* Searching
* Searching for an element
* Getting the index for strings str.index str.rindex and str.find str.rfind
* Getting the index list and tuples list.index tuple.index
* Searching keys for a value in dict
* Getting the index for sorted sequences bisect.bisect left
* Searching nested sequences
* Searching in custom classes contains and iter
Table Of Contents
0 Getting Started
1 List comprehension
2 Filter
3 List
4 Functions
5 Decorators
6 Math module
7 Loops
8 Random module
9 Comparisons
10 Importing modules
11 Sorting Minimum and Maximium
12 Operator module
13 Variable Scope and Binding
14 Basic Input and Output
15 Files, Folders, I/O
16 JSON Module
17 String Methods
18 Metaclasses
19 Indexing and Slicing
20 Generators
21 Simple Mathematical Operators
22 Reduce
23 Map Function
24 Exponentation
25 Searching
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27 Classes
28 Counting
29 Manipulating XML
30 Date and Time
31 Set
32 Collections module
33 Parallel computation
34 Multithreading
35 Writing C extensions
36 Unit Testing
37 Regular Expressions
38 Bitwise Operators
39 Incompatibilities moving from Python 2 to Python 3
40 Virtual environments
41 Copying data
42 Tuple
43 Context Managers with Statement
44 Hidden Features
45 Enum
46 String Formatting
47 Conditionals
48 Complex math
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50 The __name__ special variable
51 Check if path exists
52 Networking
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56 Creating Python packages
57 Parsing Command Line Arguments
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60 setup.py
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63 Itertools Module
64 Recursion
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66 dis module
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68 pip PyPI Package Manager
69 locale module
70 Exceptions
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72 deque module
73 Distributing self-contained applications
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76 Debugging
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79 PyInstaller - Distributing Python Code
80 Iterables and Iterators
81 Data Visualization
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83 args and kwargs
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88 Pickle data serialization
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91 Python and Excel
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98 PostgreSQL
99 Descriptor
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101 Multiprocessing
102 Creating temporary files with tempfile
103 Working with ZIP files
104 Stack
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107 Working around Global Interpreter Lock
108 Deployment using conda
109 Logging
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111 os module
112 Comments and documentation
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114 Python HTTP Server
115 Alternatives to switch statement from other languages
116 List destructuring
117 Accessing Python source code and bytecode
118 Mixins
119 Attribute Access
120 ArcPy
121 Python Anti-Patterns
122 Plugin and Extension Classes
123 Websockets
124 Immutable data types
125 String representations of class
126 Arrays
127 Operator Precedence
128 Polymorphism
129 Alternative Python implementations
130 List Comprehensions
131 Web Server Gateway Intrerface WSGI
132 2to3 tool
133 Abstract Syntax Tree
134 Abstract Base Classes
135 Unicode
136 ssh in Python
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138 Neo4j
139 Performance optimization
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143 Testing with py.test
144 Date Formatting
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146 tkinter
147 CLI subcommands
148 Defining functions with list arguments
149 SQLite3 module
150 Persistence with pickle
151 Connecting to SQL Server
152 Design Patterns
153 Multidimensional arrays
154 Audio
155 pyglet
156 queue module
157 ijson
158 webbrowser module
159 base64 module
160 Flask
161 Groupby
162 Sockets and Message Encryption / Decryption
163 pygame
164 Input Subset and Output External Data Files using Pandas
165 hashlib
166 Gzip
167 ctypes
168 Creating a Windows Service
169 Mutable vs. Immutable
170 configparser
171 Common Exceptions
172 Optical Character Recognition OCR
173 Python Data Types
174 Partial functions
175 Generating graphs
176 Unzipping Files
177 Functional Programming
178 Python Virtual Environment - virtualenv
179 sys module
180 virtual environment with virtualenvwrapper
181 virtualenvwrapper on Windows
182 Python Requests Post
183 Plotting with Matplotlib
184 Python Lex-Yacc
185 pyaudio
186 shelve
187 pip and PyPI Package Manager
188 Writing to CSV from String or List
189 Raise Custom Errors Exceptions
190 Using loops within functions
191 Contributors