Filter a List by Criteria | Dataford Interview Questions

Ashby may represent candidate records as dictionaries containing fields such as stage, location, and source. Given a list of candidate records and a criteria dictionary, return only the records whose values match every key-value pair in the criteria.

Formal Specification

Implement filter_candidates(candidates, criteria).

candidates is a list of dictionaries mapping strings to comparable values.
criteria is a dictionary mapping field names to required values.
Return a new list containing candidates that satisfy all criteria.
A candidate matches when, for every key in criteria, the candidate contains that key and its value equals the required value.
Preserve the original candidate order and do not modify the input list or dictionaries.
If criteria is empty, every candidate matches.

Constraints

0 <= len(candidates) <= 10^4
0 <= len(criteria) <= 20
Candidate values and criteria values are comparable with ==
Candidate dictionaries may omit fields named in criteria

Function Signature

def filter_candidates(candidates, criteria):

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