dict-tape

A collection of Python utilities for manipulating dictionaries

Installation

pip install dict-tape

Usage

from dict_tape import chain_get

Features

Traversal

chain_get

This is intended to help solve problems like this with deeply nested dictionaries:

some_dict.get('a', {})[0].get('b', {}).get('e', 'default')

The problem is that while .get() can help with chains of dictionaries, if you have lists intermixed in there, you can't sanely default things and have to just hope the list has items (since list indexing will throw an exception if the list is empty).

But with chain_get() you can accomplish this in a way that will sanely default:

from dict_tape import chain_get

some_dict = {'a': [{'b': {'e': 'value'}}]}
# Prints 'value'
print(chain_get(some_dict, 'a', 0, 'b', 'e', default='default'))

some_dict = {'a': []}
# Prints 'default'
print(chain_get(some_dict, 'a', 0, 'b', 'e', default='default'))

chain_get() will also do some sanity checking on your types and arguments:

• Checks to make sure that every new level is a dict, list, or str
• If the current data being indexed is a list or str, it will check that the arg provided is an int
• If the current data being indexed is a dict, it will check that the arg provided is an int or str
• If the resulting data it finds with traversal doesn't match the type provided for default, it will throw an error so you know you got something you apparently didn't expect

Options

• default: The default value to return if the chain fails at any point.
• check_arg_types: You can set this to False to disable checking whether arg types are valid for data. If this is disabled, when it would normally throw an error for this problem it will instead return the default value.
• check_data_types: You can set this to False to disable checking whether the data types are valid. If this is disabled, when it would normally throw an error for this problem it will instead return the default value.