Getting a list of values from a list of dicts

Assuming every dict has a value key, you can write (assuming your list is named l)

[d['value'] for d in l]

If value might be missing, you can use

[d['value'] for d in l if 'value' in d]

Here's another way to do it using map() and lambda functions:

>>> map(lambda d: d['value'], l)

where l is the list. I see this way "sexiest", but I would do it using the list comprehension.

Update: In case that 'value' might be missing as a key use:

>>> map(lambda d: d.get('value', 'default value'), l)

Update: I'm also not a big fan of lambdas, I prefer to name things... this is how I would do it with that in mind:

>>> import operator
>>> get_value = operator.itemgetter('value')
>>> map(get_value, l)

I would even go further and create a sole function that explicitly says what I want to achieve:

>>> import operator, functools
>>> get_value = operator.itemgetter('value')
>>> get_values = functools.partial(map, get_value)
>>> get_values(l)
... [<list of values>]

With Python 3, since map returns an iterator, use list to return a list, e.g. list(map(operator.itemgetter('value'), l)).

[x['value'] for x in list_of_dicts]

I think as simple as below would give you what you are looking for.

In[5]: ll = [{'value': 'apple', 'blah': 2}, {'value': 'banana', 'blah': 3} , {'value': 'cars', 'blah':4}]
In[6]: ld = [d.get('value', None) for d in ll]
In[7]: ld
Out[7]: ['apple', 'banana', 'cars']

You can do this with a combination of map and lambda as well but list comprehension looks more elegant and pythonic.

For a smaller input list comprehension is way to go but if the input is really big then i guess generators are the ideal way.

In[11]: gd = (d.get('value', None) for d in ll)
In[12]: gd
Out[12]: <generator object <genexpr> at 0x7f5774568b10>
In[13]: '-'.join(gd)
Out[13]: 'apple-banana-cars'

Here is a comparison of all possible solutions for bigger input

 In[2]: l = [{'value': 'apple', 'blah': 2}, {'value': 'banana', 'blah': 3} , {'value': 'cars', 'blah':4}] * 9000000
In[3]: def gen_version():
  ...:     for i in l:
  ...:         yield i.get('value', None)
  ...: 
In[4]: def list_comp_verison():
  ...:     return [i.get('value', None) for i in l]
  ...: 
In[5]: def list_verison():
  ...:     ll = []
  ...:     for i in l:
  ...:         ll.append(i.get('value', None))
  ...:     return ll
In[10]: def map_lambda_version():
   ...:      m = map(lambda i:i.get('value', None), l)
   ...:      return m
   ...: 
In[11]: %timeit gen_version()
172 ns ± 0.393 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000000 loops each)
In[12]: %timeit map_lambda_version()
203 ns ± 2.31 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000000 loops each)
In[13]: %timeit list_comp_verison()
1.61 s ± 20.4 ms per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1 loop each)
In[14]: %timeit list_verison()
2.29 s ± 4.58 ms per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1 loop each)

As you can see, generators are a better solution in comparison to the others, map is also slower compared to generator for reason I will leave up to OP to figure out.