How to get nested dictionary key value with .get()

Question

With a simple dictionary like:

myDict{\'key1\':1, \'key2\':2}

I can safely use:

print myDict.get(\'key3\')

an

Answer 1

There is a very nice blog post from Dan O'Huiginn on the topic of nested dictionaries. He ultimately suggest subclassing dict with a class that handles nesting better. Here is the subclass modified to handle your case trying to access keys of non-dict values:

class ndict(dict):
     def __getitem__(self, key):
         if key in self: return self.get(key)
         return self.setdefault(key, ndict())

You can reference nested existing keys or ones that don't exist. You can safely use the bracket notation for access rather than .get(). If a key doesn't exist on a NestedDict object, you will get back an empty NestedDict object. The initialization is a little wordy, but if you need the functionality, it could work out for you. Here are some examples:

In [97]: x = ndict({'key1': ndict({'attr1':1, 'attr2':2})})

In [98]: x
Out[98]: {'key1': {'attr1': 1, 'attr2': 2}}

In [99]: x['key1']
Out[99]: {'attr1': 1, 'attr2': 2}

In [100]: x['key1']['key2']
Out[100]: {}

In [101]: x['key2']['key2']
Out[101]: {}

In [102]: x['key1']['attr1']
Out[102]: 1