Generic dictionary

[Anny Mous]

On Sun, 20 Nov 2016 08:43 pm, Peter Otten wrote:

> Thorsten Kampe wrote:
> 
>> [Crossposted to tutor and general mailing list]
>> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I'd like to extend the dictionary class by creating a class that acts
>> like a dictionary if the class is instantiated with a dictionary and
>> acts like a "dictitem" ([(key1, value1), (key2, value2), ...]) if
>> instantiated with a list (that is dictitem).
[...]
> def GenericDict(dict_or_items):
>     if isinstance(dict_or_items, dict):
>         return dict(dict_or_items)
>     else:
>         return SimpleGenericDictWithOnlyTheFalseBranchesImplemented(
>             dict_or_items
>         )


Personally, I'd go even simpler:

dict(dict_of_items)

will return a dict regardless of whether you start with another dict or a
list or tuples. And then you just work on it as if it were a dict (which is
exactly what it actually is). And if you want to turn it back into a list
of (key, value) pairs, then you call:

list(d.items())  # Python 3

d.items()  # Python 2



-- 
Steve