[Tutor] My first recursive function...

[Liam Clarke]

> [key, info] you mean...


Oops. That'd be the one. 

Looks good to me other than the name :-) I would call it toDict() or 
> toNestedDict() maybe; IMO a function named isXXX should just return True or 
> False.


Yah, it started off as a boolean return, and then I decided to go for the 
big one, so to speak, 
having heard recursion spoken in hushed awe and/or spat out like a swear 
word.

> Are there any other pitfalls with recursion I need to watch for?
> > (I'm also expecting the occasional list that is simply a list of
> > strings, hence the and clause in the isinstance check.)
> 
> The biggest pitfall I can think of is that you get into an infinite 
> recursion. This can happen when the recursive call for some reason uses the 
> same arguments as were passed to the caller, or when the exit condition is 
> never met. I think you're fine on both counts here.



Ah, cool. Now I can run this over my full data set and see what interesting 
exceptions and errors I get.

Does this mean you gave up on pyparsing Dict?


To some extent. I could use it, but to be honest, the my limited 
understanding means the effort:effect ratio doesn't make it worth my while. 
The author of pyparsing helped me out amazingly, my parse time for a full 
set of data dropped from nearly 6 hours (!) to 3 minutes once he 
straightened out my grammar, and I think I've taken enough of his time as it 
is.

My problem is a lot of repeated items like merchant = { tag = LAT,...}so to 
utilise a pp Dict, I'd have to implement functions into the grammar to pop 
the the tag name to use as a dictionary key, and I'd rather not mess with 
the grammar any further, in case I break it, or slow it down. :S 

My understanding of pyparsing is basic, to say the least, so I'm following 
the path of least resistance here, as I get a list returned which is (now) 
simple enough to turn into a dictionary.
There's some non-consistent 'special cases' in the data structure, which I 
can handle a lot simpler when I've written the function which is creating my 
dictionary.

Regards, 

Liam Clarke

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