Quick Filter Dictionary

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

abcd a écrit :
> On Mar 14, 7:29 am, "abcd" <codecr... at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>    I have a dictionary which may contain various keys/values, however,
>> it will always contain 'name' and 'age' keys.
>>
>>    This dictionary is kept inside a class, such as....
>>
>>     class Person:

Do yourself a favor : use new-style classes:
        class Person(object):

>>         def __init__(self, name, age):
>>             self.data = {'name' : name, 'age' : age}

You may improve this part with kwargs:

          def __init__(self, name, age, **kw):
              kw.update(name=name, age=age)
              self.data = kw

Also, and FWIW, object attributes are stored in self.___dict__. Do you 
have a compelling reason to use yet another 'data' dict ?

>>         def getData(self, includeNameAge=False):
>>             if includeNameAge: return self.data
>>             tmp = <shallow or deep copy of 'data'>
                tmp = self.data.copy()
>>             del tmp['name']
>>             del tmp['age']
>>             return tmp

The problem with this implementation (as well as for the other below) is 
that in the first case you return a reference to the data dict itself, 
while in the second case you return a new dict.

p = Person('bibi', 42, foo='bar')
data = p.getData(True)
data['baaz'] = 'quux'
del data['name']
print p.data

p = Person('bibi', 42, foo='bar')
p.getData()
data['baaz'] = 'quux'
del data['foo']
print p.data

Better to *always* return a copy IMHO.