dictmagic

dictmagic is a very small python 3 package that makes it easier to do certain weird things with dictionaries.
At the moment, it lets you convert to and from "flattened" dictionaries that use path syntax instead of nested dictionaries, and simplifies the process of accessing python dictionary elements as attributes. This package is mostly written to loading, saving, using, and coverting between various configuration methods easier.

installation

pip install dictmagic

Usage

using dictmagic.paths

flattening and unflattening hierarchies of dicts lets you access mydict['hello']['world'] with mydict['hello/world'] or vice versa. This is useful in contexts where having nested dicts is not practical (making hash maps that can be used in strictly typed languages, storing data in hdf5 attributes, etc)

• dictmagic.paths.flatten() or dictmagic.flatten()
• dictmagic.paths.unflatten() or dictmagic.unflatten()

Overview

(identical for both functions)

• in_dict : input dictionary. not modified

• sep : section separator (any char can be used, / is default)

  • / in the style of unix, hdf5, and other things
  • : in the style of configparser from the standard library
  • . in the style of YAML

using paths.flatten()

• Args:

  • in_dict (dict): input (nested) dictionary
  • sep (str, optional): separator between nested dicts. Defaults to '/'.
  • except_nonstr_key (bool, optional): if True, raise exception if non-string key found. If False, converts key to string and proceeds. Defaults to True.

• Returns:

  • dict: flattened dictionary

• Raises:

  • TypeError: if non-string key found (including in dup_key_repl)

using paths.unflatten()

• Args:

  • in_dict ([type]): unput dictionary
  • sep (str, optional): separator between nested paths in in_dict. Defaults to '/'.
  • except_dup_key (bool, optional): if True, raise exception if a duplicate key is found. For behavior if False, see below. Defaults to True.
  • dup_key_repl ([type], optional): if exception is not raised, map duplicate to this value: if D contains { 'a' : 'val1', 'a/b' : 'val2' } then unflatten(D) will have { 'a' : { dup_key_repl : 'val1', 'b' : 'val2' } } Defaults to None.
  • except_nonstr_key (bool, optional): if True, raise exception if non-string key found. If False, converts key to string and proceeds. Defaults to True.

• Raises:

  • KeyError: if except_dup_key is True, raises key error when duplicate key found
  • TypeError: if non-string key found (including in dup_key_repl)

• Returns:

  • dict: nested dictionary

using dictmagic.obj

• dictmagic.obj.ObjectDict or dictmagic.ObjectDict

this class, taking a single argument data, allows accessing elements of a that dictionary as object.key instead of object['key'].

why is this useful when you can just dump it into object.__dict__ ? primarily because doing that will make copying your dict rather difficult without ending up with somewhat of a mess.

misc

originally developed by @mivanit for a config manager, then moved to knc-tools for a time. Check out that repo for more weird tools.

PRs and feature requests welcome!

you can find this project on PyPI: pypi.org/project/dictmagic/

building

to build the package: (you probably don't need to do this unless you're uploading a fork to PyPI)

python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel