Keeping a list of records with named fields that can be updated

[songbird]

Peter Otten wrote:
...
> While I think what you need is a database instead of the collection of
> csv files the way to alter namedtuples is to create  a new one:
>
> >>> from collections import namedtuple
> >>> Row = namedtuple("Row", "foo bar baz")
> >>> row = Row(1, 2, 3)
> >>> row._replace(bar=42)
> Row(foo=1, bar=42, baz=3)

  namedtuple is easier to use as that will use the csv and
csvreader and create the records without me having to do any
conversion or direct handling myself.  it's all automagically
done.  my initial version works, but i'd like it to be a bit
more elegant and handle descriptions it hasn't seen before
in a more robust manner.


> An alternative would be dataclasses where basic usage is just as easy:
>
> >>> from dataclasses import make_dataclass
> >>> Row = make_dataclass("Row", "foo bar baz".split())
> >>> row = Row(1, 2, 3)
> >>> row
> Row(foo=1, bar=2, baz=3)
> >>> row.bar = 42
> >>> row
> Row(foo=1, bar=42, baz=3)

  i do like that i can directly reference each field in a
dataclass and not have to specify a _replace for each change.

  is there an easy way to convert from namedtuple to dataclass?
i can see there is a _asdict converter, but don't really like
how that turns out as then i have to do a bunch of:
    rec['fieldname'] = blah

rec.fieldname is much easier to understand.


  songbird