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 tried some of the solutions on this page - though not all - but those I tried failed to handle the nested list of dict.

Consider a dict like this:

d = {
        'owner': {
            'name': {'first_name': 'Steven', 'last_name': 'Smith'},
            'lottery_nums': [1, 2, 3, 'four', '11', None],
            'address': {},
            'tuple': (1, 2, 'three'),
            'tuple_with_dict': (1, 2, 'three', {'is_valid': False}),
            'set': {1, 2, 3, 4, 'five'},
            'children': [
                {'name': {'first_name': 'Jessica',
                          'last_name': 'Smith', },
                 'children': []
                 },
                {'name': {'first_name': 'George',
                          'last_name': 'Smith'},
                 'children': []
                 }
            ]
        }
    }

Here's my makeshift solution:

def flatten_dict(input_node: dict, key_: str = '', output_dict: dict = {}):
    if isinstance(input_node, dict):
        for key, val in input_node.items():
            new_key = f"{key_}.{key}" if key_ else f"{key}"
            flatten_dict(val, new_key, output_dict)
    elif isinstance(input_node, list):
        for idx, item in enumerate(input_node):
            flatten_dict(item, f"{key_}.{idx}", output_dict)
    else:
        output_dict[key_] = input_node
    return output_dict

which produces:

{
  owner.name.first_name: Steven,
  owner.name.last_name: Smith,
  owner.lottery_nums.0: 1,
  owner.lottery_nums.1: 2,
  owner.lottery_nums.2: 3,
  owner.lottery_nums.3: four,
  owner.lottery_nums.4: 11,
  owner.lottery_nums.5: None,
  owner.tuple: (1, 2, 'three'),
  owner.tuple_with_dict: (1, 2, 'three', {'is_valid': False}),
  owner.set: {1, 2, 3, 4, 'five'},
  owner.children.0.name.first_name: Jessica,
  owner.children.0.name.last_name: Smith,
  owner.children.1.name.first_name: George,
  owner.children.1.name.last_name: Smith,
}

A makeshift solution and it's not perfect.
NOTE:

• it doesn't keep empty dicts such as the address: {} k/v pair.

• it won't flatten dicts in nested tuples - though it would be easy to add using the fact that python tuples act similar to lists.