Inverse dictionary lookup in Python

Your list comprehension goes through all the dict's items finding all the matches, then just returns the first key. This generator expression will only iterate as far as necessary to return the first value:

key = next(key for key, value in dd.items() if value == 'value')

where dd is the dict. Will raise StopIteration if no match is found, so you might want to catch that and return a more appropriate exception like ValueError or KeyError.

There are cases where a dictionary is a one:one mapping

Eg,

d = {1: "one", 2: "two" ...}

Your approach is ok if you are only doing a single lookup. However if you need to do more than one lookup it will be more efficient to create an inverse dictionary

ivd = {v: k for k, v in d.items()}

If there is a possibility of multiple keys with the same value, you will need to specify the desired behaviour in this case.

If your Python is 2.6 or older, you can use

ivd = dict((v, k) for k, v in d.items())