小的语法知识4

Sometimes, the filtering criteria cannot be easily expressed in a list comprehension or generator expression. For example, suppose that the filtering process involves exception handling or some other complicated detail. For this, put the filtering code into its own function and use the built-in filter() function. For example:

values = ['1', '2', '-3', '-', '4', 'N/A', '5']

def is_int(val):
    try:
        x = int(val)
        return True
    except ValueError:
        return False

ivals = list(filter(is_int, values))
print(ivals)
# Outputs ['1', '2', '-3', '4', '5']

filter() creates an iterator, so if you want to create a list of results, make sure you also use list() as shown.

Another notable filtering tool is itertools.compress(), which takes an iterable and an accompanying Boolean selector sequence as input. As output, it gives you all of the items in the iterable where the corresponding element in the selector is True. This can be useful if you’re trying to apply the results of filtering one sequence to another related sequence. For example, suppose you have the following two columns of data:

addresses = [
    '5412 N CLARK',
    '5148 N CLARK',
    '5800 E 58TH',
    '2122 N CLARK'
    '5645 N RAVENSWOOD',
    '1060 W ADDISON',
    '4801 N BROADWAY',
    '1039 W GRANVILLE',
]

counts = [ 0, 3, 10, 4, 1, 7, 6, 1]

Now suppose you want to make a list of all addresses where the corresponding count value was greater than 5. Here’s how you could do it:

>>> from itertools import compress
>>> more5 = [n > 5 for n in counts]
>>> more5
[False, False, True, False, False, True, True, False]
>>> list(compress(addresses, more5))
['5800 E 58TH', '4801 N BROADWAY', '1039 W GRANVILLE']
>>>

The key here is to first create a sequence of Booleans that indicates which elements satisfy the desired condition. The compress() function then picks out the items corresponding to True values.
Like filter(), compress() normally returns an iterator. Thus, you need to use list() to turn the results into a list if desired.