Fix Python – filter items in a python dictionary where keys contain a specific string

Question 1

I’m a C coder developing something in python. I know how to do the following in C (and hence in C-like logic applied to python), but I’m wondering what the ‘Python’ way of doing it is.

I have a dictionary d, and I’d like to operate on a subset of the items, only those who’s key (string) contains a specific substring.

i.e. the C logic would be:

for key in d:
    if filter_string in key:
        # do something
    else
        # do nothing, continue

I’m imagining the python version would be something like

filtered_dict = crazy_python_syntax(d, substring)
for key,value in filtered_dict.iteritems():
    # do something

I’ve found a lot of posts on here regarding filtering dictionaries, but couldn’t find one which involved exactly this.

My dictionary is not nested and i’m using python 2.7

Question 2

How about a dict comprehension:

filtered_dict = {k:v for k,v in d.iteritems() if filter_string in k}

One you see it, it should be self-explanatory, as it reads like English pretty well.

This syntax requires Python 2.7 or greater.

In Python 3, there is only dict.items(), not iteritems() so you would use:

filtered_dict = {k:v for (k,v) in d.items() if filter_string in k}

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