Is there a way to implement an equivalent of the item method shown below, which gives the same functionality without copying all the data or looping? So in this example it would return ('bar', 20).
from collections import OrderedDict class MyOrderedDict(OrderedDict): def item(self, index): return list(self.items())[index] d = MyOrderedDict() d["foo"] = 10 d["bar"] = 20 d["baz"] = 25 print(d.item(1)) You can try
from collections import OrderedDict class MyOrderedDict(OrderedDict): name_to_index = {} def item(self, index): return tuple([self.name_to_index[index], self[self.name_to_index[index]]]) def __setitem__(self, key, value): self.name_to_index[len(self.name_to_index)] = key super().__setitem__(key, value) d = MyOrderedDict() d["foo"] = 10 d["bar"] = 20 d["baz"] = 25 print(d.item(1)) Output
('bar', 20) This code will store in each assignment of value the index and the key and when you will call item with an index it will return the relevant value for the index position.
__setitem__ having been overridden when populating the dictionary. Apologies for that. I don't want to destroy your answer by editing the question now, but the use case I probably more had in mind was some function like def item(dct, index): ... outside the class.
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