Flatten nested dictionaries, compressing keys

Question

Suppose you have a dictionary like:

{\'a\': 1,
 \'c\': {\'a\': 2,
       \'b\': {\'x\': 5,
             \'y\' : 10}},
 \'d\': [1, 2, 3]}

Ho

Answer 1

Here is a kind of a "functional", "one-liner" implementation. It is recursive, and based on a conditional expression and a dict comprehension.

def flatten_dict(dd, separator='_', prefix=''):
    return { prefix + separator + k if prefix else k : v
             for kk, vv in dd.items()
             for k, v in flatten_dict(vv, separator, kk).items()
             } if isinstance(dd, dict) else { prefix : dd }

Test:

In [2]: flatten_dict({'abc':123, 'hgf':{'gh':432, 'yu':433}, 'gfd':902, 'xzxzxz':{"432":{'0b0b0b':231}, "43234":1321}}, '.')
Out[2]: 
{'abc': 123,
 'gfd': 902,
 'hgf.gh': 432,
 'hgf.yu': 433,
 'xzxzxz.432.0b0b0b': 231,
 'xzxzxz.43234': 1321}