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

I was thinking of a subclass of UserDict to automagically flat the keys.

class FlatDict(UserDict):
    def __init__(self, *args, separator='.', **kwargs):
        self.separator = separator
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)

    def __setitem__(self, key, value):
        if isinstance(value, dict):
            for k1, v1 in FlatDict(value, separator=self.separator).items():
                super().__setitem__(f"{key}{self.separator}{k1}", v1)
        else:
            super().__setitem__(key, value)

‌ The advantages it that keys can be added on the fly, or using standard dict instanciation, without surprise:

‌

>>> fd = FlatDict(
...    {
...        'person': {
...            'sexe': 'male', 
...            'name': {
...                'first': 'jacques',
...                'last': 'dupond'
...            }
...        }
...    }
... )
>>> fd
{'person.sexe': 'male', 'person.name.first': 'jacques', 'person.name.last': 'dupond'}
>>> fd['person'] = {'name': {'nickname': 'Bob'}}
>>> fd
{'person.sexe': 'male', 'person.name.first': 'jacques', 'person.name.last': 'dupond', 'person.name.nickname': 'Bob'}
>>> fd['person.name'] = {'civility': 'Dr'}
>>> fd
{'person.sexe': 'male', 'person.name.first': 'jacques', 'person.name.last': 'dupond', 'person.name.nickname': 'Bob', 'person.name.civility': 'Dr'}