[Tutor] Walk a dictionary recursively

[paul brian]

Firstly are you using this to store or alter data regarding Microsoft
Active Directory?. If so I suggest you look at some of their ADSI /
WMI interfaces for COM (if you use win32com from Mark Hammond or
activeState life becomes a lot easier. Well the Windows programming
part of it does)

As for the particulars of your question, you might find life simpler
if you created a "parentID" (and/or childID) for each unique entry in
the tree.

As you are going to be growing the data list in size one other area to
look at is generators - this will enable  you to walk arbitrarily
large trees but with a far lower memory footprint and hence a lot
faster.  A generator class returns an object that will walk through an
iteration set (like a for loop) but at the end of every step will
"disappear"  from the stack and when it is called again it starts
exactly where it left off.

So I would suggest you create generaotr based classes to store your
data, using an explicit parent/child relationship rather than relying
on the implicit relationships of which dictionary is stored inside
which dictionary.

It is still a far chunk of work.  I suggest you start on the parent
child thing first.
Think about having a single point of entry that creates a new object
and then "hangs" it on the tree.

I hope that helps and do please come back to the list with how you are
gettng on.



On 10/11/05, Negroup - <negroup at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi tutors, in my application I found convenient to store all the data
> in a data structure based on a dictionary containing a lot of keys,
> and each of them host other dictionary with lists and dictionaries
> nested inside and so on...
>
> First of all I'd like to know if it is normal to use so complex data
> structures in which store data, or if it possible in some way to
> organize them using smaller "organizational units".
>
> This is instead the problem I should solve as soon as possible: I
> should apply a function, exactly the string's method decode('utf-8'),
> to  each key and value of the above descripted dictionary. Consider
> that the keys are integers or strings, and if a key is a list, I need
> to decode each contained element. Is there a way to walk recursively
> the dictionary, or should I write my own walk function?
>
> Thanks in advance,
> negroup
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Paul Brian
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