dottable-dict 0.0.3

Your everyday dictionary, with the special ability to be accessed using dot-notation

Dottable Dictionary

Your everyday dictionary, with the special ability to be accessed using dot-notation.

Use dottable dictionaries to turn this:
d["somekey"]["some_inner_key"]["some_internal_key"]
to this:
d.somekey.some_inner_key.some_internal_key.

Background

The basic idea behind this package was to migrate JavaScript's dot-notation access to Python dictionaries. In many (maybe most) cases, dictionaries are used with keys which can serve as identifiers (for more on those take a look here).
By taking advantage of this, dictionary access can be as intuitive as accessing properties within an object (rather than being constrained to using strings).

Importantly - dottable dictionaries are first and foremost dictionaries. Therefore, they implement the same basic functionalities as native dict objects, and are generally designed to interact with them as seamlessly as possible, such that using dottable dictionaries should be compatible with existing code and/or any external module/package.

Functionality

Dictionary functionality

Some basic native dict functionalities which are implemented in dottable dictionaries:

• copy()
• update()
• keys(), values(), items()
• in operator (__contains__())
• Iterability (__iter__)
• TBD: setdefault

Extra functionality

Some extra functionality (extending native dict functionality):

• Adding & merging: merging mappings to get a unified view of all values (also availble using the + operator)
• Access by complex string paths - set/get properties using a dot-separated path (e.g., ["a"]["b"]["c"] <-> "a.b.c"). This can be useful for dynamically accessing properties in objects with complex data schemas.
• Immutable copies - generating an immutable copy of the current state of the mapping. This is also used to allow a pseudo-hash of the mapping (i.e., hash of the current state)

Conversions

Dottable dictionaries can be directly (recursively) converted to native dict objects by using the simple_dict property.