Python create own dict view of subset of dictionary

Question

As the many questions on the topic here on SO attest, taking a slice of a dictionary is a pretty common task, with a fairly nice solution:

{k:v for k,v in di         


        

Answer 1

There seems to be no builtin way to obtain a view into a dictionary. The easiest workaround appears to be Jochen's approach. I adapted his code slightly to make it work for my purposes:

from collections import MutableMapping

class DictView(MutableMapping):
    def __init__(self, source, valid_keys):
        self.source, self.valid_keys = source, valid_keys

    def __getitem__(self, key):
        if key in self.valid_keys:
            return self.source[key]
        else:
            raise KeyError(key)

    def __len__(self):
        return len(self.valid_keys)

    def __iter__(self):
        for key in self.valid_keys:
            yield key

    def __setitem__(self, key, value):
        if key in self.valid_keys:
            self.source[key] = value
        else:
            raise KeyError(key)

    def __delitem__(self, key):
        self.valid_keys.remove(key)

d = dict(a=1, b=2, c=3)
valid_keys = ['a', 'c']
d2 = DictView(d, valid_keys)
d2['a'] = -1  # overwrite element 'a' in source dictionary
print d  # prints {'a': -1, 'c': 3, 'b': 2}

So d2 behaves like a dictionary in all aspects except for printing, due to the different __repr__() method. Inheriting from dict to get __repr__() would require reimplementation of each and every method, as is done for collections.OrderedDict. If one wants only a readonly view, one can inherit from collections.Mapping and save the implementation of __setitem__() and __delitem__(). I find DictView useful to select parameters from self.__dict__ and pass them on in a compact form.