Dictionary of dictionaries in Python?

Question

From another function, I have tuples like this (\'falseName\', \'realName\', positionOfMistake), eg. (\'Milter\', \'Miller\', 4). I need to write a

Answer 1

Using collections.defaultdict is a big time-saver when you're building dicts and don't know beforehand which keys you're going to have.

Here it's used twice: for the resulting dict, and for each of the values in the dict.

import collections

def aggregate_names(errors):
    result = collections.defaultdict(lambda: collections.defaultdict(list))
    for real_name, false_name, location in errors:
        result[real_name][false_name].append(location)
    return result

Combining this with your code:

dictionary = aggregate_names(previousFunction(string))

Or to test:

EXAMPLES = [
    ('Fred', 'Frad', 123),
    ('Jim', 'Jam', 100),
    ('Fred', 'Frod', 200),
    ('Fred', 'Frad', 300)]
print aggregate_names(EXAMPLES)

Answer 2

If it is only to add a new tuple and you are sure that there are no collisions in the inner dictionary, you can do this:

def addNameToDictionary(d, tup):
    if tup[0] not in d:
        d[tup[0]] = {}
    d[tup[0]][tup[1]] = [tup[2]]

Answer 3

dictionary's setdefault is a good way to update an existing dict entry if it's there, or create a new one if it's not all in one go:

Looping style:

# This is our sample data
data = [("Milter", "Miller", 4), ("Milter", "Miler", 4), ("Milter", "Malter", 2)]

# dictionary we want for the result
dictionary = {}

# loop that makes it work
for realName, falseName, position in data:
    dictionary.setdefault(realName, {})[falseName] = position

dictionary now equals:

{'Milter': {'Malter': 2, 'Miler': 4, 'Miller': 4}}