A question of style (finding item in list of tuples)

Mon May 21 09:39:59 EDT 2012

On Monday, 21 May 2012 13:37:29 UTC+1, Roy Smith wrote:
> I've got this code in a django app:
>> CHOICES = [
> ('NONE', 'No experience required'),
> ('SAIL', 'Sailing experience, new to racing'),
> ('RACE', 'General racing experience'),
> ('GOOD', 'Experienced racer'),
> ('ROCK', 'Rock star'),
> ]
>> def experience_text(self):
> for code, text in self.CHOICES:
> if code == self.level:
> return text
> return "????"
>> Calling experience_text("ROCK") should return "Rock star". Annoyingly, 
> django handles this for you automatically inside a form, but if you also 
> need it in your application code, you have to roll your own.
>> The above code works, but it occurs to me that I could use the much 
> shorter:
>> def experience_text(self):
> return dict(CHOICES).get("self.level", "???")
>> So, the question is, purely as a matter of readability, which would you 
> find easier to understand when reading some new code? Assume the list 
> of choices is short enough that the cost of building a temporary dict on 
> each call is negligible. I'm just after style and readability here.

Haven't used django in a while, but doesn't the model provide a get_experience_display() method which you could use...
Failing that, if order isn't important, you can not bother with tuples and have CHOICES be a dict, then pass choices=CHOICES.iteritems() as I believe it takes any iterable, and maybe plug an ordereddict if order is important.
hth
Jon.