Playing with dictionaries

[Peter Otten]

Roberto A. F. De Almeida wrote:

> Suppose I have a dictionary containg nested dictionaries. Something
> like this:
> 
>>>> pprint.pprint(dataset)
> {'casts': {'experimenter': None,
>            'location': {'latitude': None,
>                         'longitude': None},
>            'time': None,
>            'xbt': {'depth': None,
>                    'temperature': None}},
>  'catalog_number': None,
>  'z': {'array': {'z': None},
>        'maps': {'lat': None,
>                 'lon': None}}}
> 
> I want to assign to the values in the dictionary the hierarchy of keys
> to it. For example:
> 
>>>> dataset['casts']['experimenter'] = 'casts.experimenter'
>>>> dataset['z']['array']['z'] = 'z.array.z'
> 
> Of course I would like to do this automatically, independent of the
> structure of the dictionary. Is there an easy way to do it?

class Dict:
    def __init__(self, name=None, parent=None):
        self.name = name
        self.parent = parent
    def __getitem__(self, name):
        return Dict(name, self)
    def __str__(self):
        if self.parent and self.parent.parent:
            return ".".join((str(self.parent), self.name))
        elif self.name is not None:
            return self.name
        return "I warned you"


d = Dict()
print d['casts']
print d['casts']['experimenter']
print d['casts']['location']['latitude']
#print d # do not uncomment

Seems to work :-)
I doubt that anybody can come up with something more automatic or more
independent of the structure of the dictionary than the above. And it was
easy, too, wasn't it?

Peter