.net – n alternative to Dictionary/SortedList that allows duplicates?

Seems like string.Replace should have an overload that takes a StringComparison argument. Since it doesn't, you could try something like this:

public static string ReplaceString(string str, string oldValue, string newValue, StringComparison comparison)
{
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

    int previousIndex = 0;
    int index = str.IndexOf(oldValue, comparison);
    while (index != -1)
    {
        sb.Append(str.Substring(previousIndex, index - previousIndex));
        sb.Append(newValue);
        index += oldValue.Length;

        previousIndex = index;
        index = str.IndexOf(oldValue, index, comparison);
    }
    sb.Append(str.Substring(previousIndex));

    return sb.ToString();
}

Personally, one of the things I love about python is the tuple-dict combination. What you have here is effectively a 2d array (where x = fruit name and y = color), and I am generally a supporter of the dict of tuples for implementing 2d arrays, at least when something like numpy or a database isn't more appropriate. So in short, I think you've got a good approach.

Note that you can't use dicts as keys in a dict without doing some extra work, so that's not a very good solution.

That said, you should also consider namedtuple(). That way you could do this:

>>> from collections import namedtuple
>>> Fruit = namedtuple("Fruit", ["name", "color"])
>>> f = Fruit(name="banana", color="red")
>>> print f
Fruit(name='banana', color='red')
>>> f.name
'banana'
>>> f.color
'red'

Now you can use your fruitcount dict:

>>> fruitcount = {Fruit("banana", "red"):5}
>>> fruitcount[f]
5

Other tricks:

>>> fruits = fruitcount.keys()
>>> fruits.sort()
>>> print fruits
[Fruit(name='apple', color='green'), 
 Fruit(name='apple', color='red'), 
 Fruit(name='banana', color='blue'), 
 Fruit(name='strawberry', color='blue')]
>>> fruits.sort(key=lambda x:x.color)
>>> print fruits
[Fruit(name='banana', color='blue'), 
 Fruit(name='strawberry', color='blue'), 
 Fruit(name='apple', color='green'), 
 Fruit(name='apple', color='red')]

Echoing chmullig, to get a list of all colors of one fruit, you would have to filter the keys, i.e.

bananas = [fruit for fruit in fruits if fruit.name=='banana']