Reading multidimensional arrays from a POST request in Django

Question

I have a jquery client that is sending a POST request with a multidimensional array, something like this:

friends[0][id]    12345678 
friends[0][nam         


        

Answer 1

DrMeers' link is no longer valid, so I'll post another method of achieving the same thing. It's also not perfect, and it would be much better if Django had such a function built-in. But, since it doesn't:

Converting Multi-dimensional Form Arrays in Django

Disclaimer: I wrote that post. The essence of it is in this function, which could be more robust, but it works for arrays of one-level objects:

def getDictArray(post, name):
    dic = {}
    for k in post.keys():
        if k.startswith(name):
            rest = k[len(name):]

            # split the string into different components
            parts = [p[:-1] for p in rest.split('[')][1:]
            print parts
            id = int(parts[0])

            # add a new dictionary if it doesn't exist yet
            if id not in dic:
                dic[id] = {}

            # add the information to the dictionary
            dic[id][parts[1]] = post.get(k)
    return dic