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

Not exactly what the OP asked, but lots of folks are coming here looking for ways to flatten real-world nested JSON data which can have nested key-value json objects and arrays and json objects inside the arrays and so on. JSON doesn't include tuples, so we don't have to fret over those.

I found an implementation of the list-inclusion comment by @roneo to the answer posted by @Imran :

https://github.com/ScriptSmith/socialreaper/blob/master/socialreaper/tools.py#L8

import collections
def flatten(dictionary, parent_key=False, separator='.'):
    """
    Turn a nested dictionary into a flattened dictionary
    :param dictionary: The dictionary to flatten
    :param parent_key: The string to prepend to dictionary's keys
    :param separator: The string used to separate flattened keys
    :return: A flattened dictionary
    """

    items = []
    for key, value in dictionary.items():
        new_key = str(parent_key) + separator + key if parent_key else key
        if isinstance(value, collections.MutableMapping):
            items.extend(flatten(value, new_key, separator).items())
        elif isinstance(value, list):
            for k, v in enumerate(value):
                items.extend(flatten({str(k): v}, new_key).items())
        else:
            items.append((new_key, value))
    return dict(items)

Test it:

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

>> {'a': 1, 'c.a': 2, 'c.b.x': 5, 'c.b.y': 10, 'd.0': 1, 'd.1': 2, 'd.2': 3}

Annd that does the job I need done: I throw any complicated json at this and it flattens it out for me.

All credits to https://github.com/ScriptSmith .