grab dict keys/values without iterating ?!

[Ian Kelly]

On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 6:02 PM, Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is what I did not so long ago when writing a utility for
> typeahead lookup, except that to save some space and time I only
> nested the dicts as deeply as there were still multiple entries.  As
> an example of what the data structure looked like:
>
> lookups = {
>     'a': {
>         'l': {
>             'g': 'algebra',
>             'p': 'alphanumeric',
>         },
>         's': 'asterisk',
>     },
>     'b': 'bobcat',
>     ...
> }
>
> It does make the update process more complicated though, as adding new
> words potentially requires existing words to be nested deeper than
> they are currently.

And I'm simplifying that a bit, because I also included at each node
the preferred (in my case, the first alphabetically) completion for
that prefix, to avoid the need to iterate over the subtree.