Dictionary to lowercase in Python

Question

I wish to do this but for a dictionary:

\"My string\".lower()

Is there a built in function or should I use a loop?

Answer 1

The following is identical to Rick Copeland's answer, just written without a using generator expression:

outdict = {}
for k, v in {'My Key': 'My Value'}.iteritems():
    outdict[k.lower()] = v.lower()

Generator-expressions, list comprehension's and (in Python 2.7 and higher) dict comprehension's are basically ways of rewriting loops.

In Python 2.7+, you can use a dictionary comprehension (it's a single line of code, but you can reformat them to make it more readable):

{k.lower():v.lower()
    for k, v in
    {'My Key': 'My Value'}.items()
}

They are quite often tidier than the loop equivalent, as you don't have to initialise an empty dict/list/etc.. but, if you need to do anything more than a single function/method call they can quickly become messy.

Answer 2

You will need to use either a loop or a list/generator comprehension. If you want to lowercase all the keys and values, you can do this::

dict((k.lower(), v.lower()) for k,v in {'My Key':'My Value'}.iteritems())

If you want to lowercase just the keys, you can do this::

dict((k.lower(), v) for k,v in {'My Key':'My Value'}.iteritems())

Generator expressions (used above) are often useful in building dictionaries; I use them all the time. All the expressivity of a loop comprehension with none of the memory overhead.

Answer 3

def convert_to_lower_case(data):
    if type(data) is dict:
        for k, v in data.iteritems():
            if type(v) is str:
                data[k] = v.lower()
            elif type(v) is list:
                data[k] = [x.lower() for x in v]
            elif type(v) is dict:
                data[k] = convert_to_lower_case(v)
    return data

Answer 4

Shorter way in python 3: {k.lower(): v for k, v in my_dict.items()}

Answer 5

I used JSON library to deserialize the dictionary first, apply lower case than convert back to dictionary

import json
mydict = {'UPPERCASE': 'camelValue'}
print(mydict)
mydict_in_str = json.dumps(mydict)
mydict_lowercase = json.loads(mydict_in_str.lower())
print(mydict_lowercase)

Answer 6

Love the way you can use multilevel functions, here's my way of lowercase-ing the keys

def to_lower(dictionary):

    def try_iterate(k):
        return lower_by_level(k) if isinstance(k, dict) else k

    def try_lower(k):
        return k.lower() if isinstance(k, str) else k

    def lower_by_level(data):
        return dict((try_lower(k), try_iterate(v)) for k, v in data.items())

    return lower_by_level(dictionary)