dictgetlike

dictgetlike is a programming utility concept used to retrieve values from a dictionary by matching keys to a pattern rather than accessing a single exact key. It is commonly employed in situations where keys follow naming conventions or when a subset of keys must be selected based on partial information, such as configuration options, templates, or data extraction tasks. The function typically returns either a new dictionary of matched items or a list of the corresponding values, depending on the API.

A typical dictgetlike interface accepts a source dictionary, a pattern, and optional flags such as case sensitivity, the matching method (glob-like or regular expression), and whether to limit results. Examples of behavior include returning all items whose keys match a wildcard pattern like "user_*" or all keys that satisfy a regex. Some implementations offer modes to return only keys, only values, or both, and to cap the number of results.

In Python, a common approach uses dictionary comprehension with a pattern matcher (for example, fnmatch for wildcards or re for regular expressions). An illustrative use case is filtering a configuration dictionary to extract keys that begin with a certain prefix. In JavaScript or other languages, similar logic relies on iterating over key names, applying the pattern, and collecting matches. The primary considerations are performance (linear in the number of keys) and the potential for ambiguous results if patterns overlap or are too broad.

See also: dictionary, pattern matching, wildcard, regular expression, fnmatch, glob.