Recursively accessing paths and values of a nested dictionary

Question

In Python 2.7, how does one dynamically access and print out the keys and values of a nested dictionary? Here\'s a nonsensical example: https://jsoneditoronline.org/?id=da7a

Answer 1

You can use a recursive visitor/generator which returns all the path/value pairs of the leaves:

def visit_dict(d, path=[]):
    for k, v in d.items():
        if not isinstance(v, dict):
            yield path + [k], v
        else:
            yield from visit_dict(v, path + [k])

(replace the yield from ... with the appropriate equivalent if using Python < 3.4)

Getting the keys:

>>> ','.join('/'.join(k) for k, v in visit_dict(json_data['sample_dict'][0]))
'dict_id,person/person_id,person/name,person/age,family/person_id,family/members/father,family/members/mother,family/members/son,family/family_id,items_id,furniture/type,furniture/color,furniture/size,furniture/purchases'

and the values:

>>> ','.join(str(v) for k, v in visit_dict(json_data['sample_dict'][0]))
'5,15,Martin,18,20,Jose,Maddie,Jerry,2,None,Chair,Brown,Large,[]'