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The syntactic sugar for alternatives in replacement rules is clean:

{a|b|c-> 1, d->2}

Are there any analogous shorthands for keys in associations. I want to specify multiple equivalent keys in an association, like this:

<| Key[a|b|c]-> 1, Key[d]->2|>

The motivation is that sometimes the values in key-value pairs are large (and so you'd rather not flatten it out and add duplicate them for each key alias).

$ChordFormulas = <|"Major"|"Maj"->{0,4,7}, "m"|"Minor"|"Min" -> {0,3,7}, "9"|"79"->...|>

Related:

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  • $\begingroup$ How do you want to use these associations? Are they constants or do you update (change) them frequently? If they are constants, Dispatch (or just a rule list) would work very well, I think. $\endgroup$
    – Szabolcs
    Jan 19, 2016 at 9:01

1 Answer 1

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It seems you have already done it with Alternative.

c = <|"Major" | "Maj" -> {0, 4, 7}, "Minor" | "Min" -> {0, 3, 7}|>;

You would just need KeySelect and MatchQ.

KeySelect[MatchQ[#]@"Major" &]@c
(* <|"Major" | "Maj" -> {0, 4, 7}|> *)

or with ReplaceAll.

KeySelect["Maj" /. # -> True &]@c
(* <|"Major" | "Maj" -> {0, 4, 7}|> *)
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  • $\begingroup$ In[211]:= <|"Major" | "Maj" -> {0, 4, 7}|>["Major"] Out[211]= Missing["KeyAbsent", "Major"] $\endgroup$
    – M.R.
    Jan 19, 2016 at 1:45
  • $\begingroup$ With this approach, everytime I do a query I'll need to use MatchQ which is slow. $\endgroup$
    – M.R.
    Jan 19, 2016 at 1:47
  • $\begingroup$ @M.R. Only way I can think of at the moment. It does allow you to use Alternatives and store the value once like you asked. $\endgroup$
    – Edmund
    Jan 19, 2016 at 1:48
  • $\begingroup$ @M.R. You can use ReplaceAll instead of MatchQ. "Maj" /. # -> True &. However, that will fall down if you ever use True as a key. $\endgroup$
    – Edmund
    Jan 19, 2016 at 1:54

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