python list of dictionaries find duplicates based on value

Question

I have a list of dicts:

a =[{'id': 1,'desc': 'smth'},
    {'id': 2,'desc': 'smthelse'},
    {'id': 1,'desc': 'smthelse2'},
    {'id': 1,'desc': 'smthelse3'}]

I would like to go trough the list and find those dicts that have the same id value (e.g. id=1) and create a new dict:

b = [{'id':1, 'desc' : [smth, smthelse2,smthelse3]}, 
     {'id': 2, 'desc': 'smthelse'}]

Answer 1

You can try:

import operator, itertools

key = operator.itemgetter('id')

b = [{'id': x, 'desc': [d['desc'] for d in y]} 
     for x, y in itertools.groupby(sorted(a, key=key), key=key)]