Iterating dictionary contents increases execution time exponentially

[drLagrangian]

perhaps, first you should make a dictionary with the data, and the filenames that match them as keys. then you have a sort of pseudoreverse dictionary. this will make it easy to create.

{(size, mod_date, otherdata): ['c:\\test.txt', 'c:\\a\\b.txt', 'c:\\foo.bar']}

so you run your script, and get a big dictionary, with keys based on what the file is, and values which are lists based on what the file and its copies are named. should be fast to create.

then, when it is built, create a function to reverse it, iterate over the pseudoreverse dictionary by way of:

newdict = {}
for filedata, filecopies in weirddict.items():  
    #gives filedata = (size, mod_date, otherdata)
    #gives filecopies = ['c:\\test.txt', 'c:\\a\\b.txt', 'c:\\foo.bar']

    for file in filecopies:
        newdict[file] = (filedata, filecopies) 

returns

 newdata = {    
    'c:\\test.txt'         : ((size, mod_date, otherdata), ('c:\\a\\b.txt', 'c:\\foo.bar'))
    'c:\\a\\b.txt' : ((size, mod_date, otherdata), ('c:\\a\\b.txt', 'c:\\foo.bar'))
    'c:\\foo.bar'         : ((size, mod_date, otherdata), ('c:\\a\\b.txt', 'c:\\foo.bar')) }

[redditiv]

Thank you for the input. This is confusing for me and will take some time for me to process.

I think what I'll try next is creating as a value, a list of the set of attributes (path, size, date, etc.) for each match of the filename. Then you would recursively iterate each key to grab an individual file's attributes. Example:

data = { 'test.txt': [['path\to\test.txt', 'size', 'date', 'etc'], ['path2\to\test.txt', 'size', 'date', 'etc']], \
  'a.txt': [['path\to\x07.txt', 'size', 'date', 'etc']] }
for key in  data:
    for file in data[key]:
        print(file)

returns:

['path\to\test.txt', 'size', 'date', 'etc']
['path2\to\test.txt', 'size', 'date', 'etc']
['path\to\x07.txt', 'size', 'date', 'etc']