Filter dict to contain only certain keys?

Question

I've got a dict that has a whole bunch of entries. I'm only interested in a select few of them. Is there an easy way to prune all the other ones out?

Answer 1

Constructing a new dict:

dict_you_want = { your_key: old_dict[your_key] for your_key in your_keys }

Uses dictionary comprehension.

If you use a version which lacks them (ie Python 2.6 and earlier), make it dict((your_key, old_dict[your_key]) for ...). It's the same, though uglier.

Note that this, unlike jnnnnn's version, has stable performance (depends only on number of your_keys) for old_dicts of any size. Both in terms of speed and memory. Since this is a generator expression, it processes one item at a time, and it doesn't looks through all items of old_dict.

Removing everything in-place:

unwanted = set(keys) - set(your_dict)
for unwanted_key in unwanted: del your_dict[unwanted_key]

Answer 2

Given your original dictionary orig and the set of entries that you're interested in keys:

filtered = dict(zip(keys, [orig[k] for k in keys]))

which isn't as nice as delnan's answer, but should work in every Python version of interest. It is, however, fragile to each element of keys existing in your original dictionary.

Answer 3

Short form:

[s.pop(k) for k in list(s.keys()) if k not in keep]

As most of the answers suggest in order to maintain the conciseness we have to create a duplicate object be it a list or dict. This one creates a throw-away list but deletes the keys in original dict.

Answer 4

You can do that with project function from my funcy library:

from funcy import project
small_dict = project(big_dict, keys)

Also take a look at select_keys.

Answer 5

Another option:

content = dict(k1='foo', k2='nope', k3='bar')
selection = ['k1', 'k3']
filtered = filter(lambda i: i[0] in selection, content.items())

But you get a list (Python 2) or an iterator (Python 3) returned by filter(), not a dict.