Making a Reusable Python Function to Find the First Match

00:00 Making a Reusable Python Function to Find the First Match. Let’s say the iterables that you expect to use are going to be on the large side, and you are interested in squeezing every bit of performance out of your code.

00:14 For that reason, you’ll use generators instead of a for loop. You’ll also be dealing with a variety of different iterables with a variety of items and want flexibility in the way that you match, so you’ll design your function to be able to accomplish the following goals: returning the first truthy value, returning the first match, returning the first truthy result of values being passed through a key function, returning the first match of values being passed through a key function, and returning a default value if there’s no match.

00:51 While there are many ways to implement this, here’s a way to do it with pattern matching, which is available in Python 3.10 and later. You can call the function with up to four arguments, and it will behave differently depending on the combination of arguments that you pass into it.

01:16 The function’s behavior mainly depends on the value and key arguments. That’s why the match statement checks if value is None and uses the callable() function to learn whether key is a function. For example, if both the match conditions are True, then it means that you’ve passed in a key but no value.

01:34 This means that you want each item in the iterable to be passed through the key function, and the return value should be the first truthy result.

02:02 As another example, if both match conditions are False, then this means you’ve passed in a value but not a key. Passing a value and no key means that you want the first element in the iterable.

02:13 That’s a direct match with the value provided. Once match is over, you have your generator. All that’s left to do is to call next() with the generator and the default argument for the first match.

02:30 With this function, you can search for matches in four different ways. You can get the first truthy item, the first item matching the value argument, the first result of key(item) that equals the value argument,

03:21 or the first truthy result of key(item).

03:36 With this function, you have lots of flexibility in how to match. For instance, you could deal with only values or only key functions or both.

03:48 In the first package mentioned earlier in the course, the function signature is slightly different. It doesn’t have a value parameter.

03:57 You can still accomplish the same effect as seen earlier by relying on the key parameter. As with matplotlib, the command to install first into your virtual environment is the same regardless to the platform you are working on.

04:20 Here, you can see first in action.

04:46 It’s also possible to create an alternative implementation of get_first() that mirrors the first package’s signature.

05:21 You can then run the same code as seen for the first package and get the same result.

05:50 Regardless of which implementation you ultimately use, you now have a performant, reusable function that can get the first item you need. In the next section of the course, you’ll take a look back at what you’ve learned.