Suppose I have quantities of fruits of different colors, e.g., 24 blue bananas, 12 green apples, 0 blue strawberries and so on. I'd like to organize them in a data structure in Python that allows for easy selection and sorting. My idea was to put them into a dictionary with tuples as keys, e.g.,

{
    ('banana',    'blue' ): 24,
    ('apple',     'green'): 12,
    ('strawberry','blue' ): 0,
    # ...
}

or even dictionaries, e.g.,

{
    {'fruit': 'banana',    'color': 'blue' }: 24,
    {'fruit': 'apple',     'color': 'green'}: 12,
    {'fruit': 'strawberry','color': 'blue' }: 0,
    # ...
}

I'd like to retrieve a list of all blue fruit, or bananas of all colors, for example, or to sort this dictionary by the name of the fruit. Are there ways to do this in a clean way?

It might well be that dictionaries with tuples as keys are not the proper way to handle this situation.

All suggestions welcome!

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