matching objects by a tuple field criterion

[bullockbefriending bard]

quite so, i rephrased docstring to be:

"""criteria is an iterable containing either '*' instances or  strings
of comma-separated integers. e.g.  ['*','1,2,3', '11,12']"""

thanks very much for the idea! upon further reflection, this seems to
be a more elegant solution for my case than the ad-hoc generator or
list comprehension approach. this is because i *do* have to filter
data based on multiple single field criteria and i know all of these
criteria at the same time - so it makes a lot of sense to do as you
have done and then only do one filter operation to pull out all the
objects i am interested in.