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 always prefer access dict objects via .items(), so for flattening dicts I use the following recursive generator flat_items(d). If you like to have dict again, simply wrap it like this: flat = dict(flat_items(d))

def flat_items(d, key_separator='.'):
    """
    Flattens the dictionary containing other dictionaries like here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6027558/flatten-nested-python-dictionaries-compressing-keys

    >>> example = {'a': 1, 'c': {'a': 2, 'b': {'x': 5, 'y' : 10}}, 'd': [1, 2, 3]}
    >>> flat = dict(flat_items(example, key_separator='_'))
    >>> assert flat['c_b_y'] == 10
    """
    for k, v in d.items():
        if type(v) is dict:
            for k1, v1 in flat_items(v, key_separator=key_separator):
                yield key_separator.join((k, k1)), v1
        else:
            yield k, v