Filter a List by Criteria

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.