pydicti 0.0.2

Case insensitive derivable dictionary

Case insensitive derivable dictionary.

License

Copyright © 2013 Thomas Gläßle [e-mail]

This work is free. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License, Version 2, as published by Sam Hocevar. See the COPYING file for more details.

This program is free software. It comes without any warranty, to the extent permitted by applicable law.

Global namespace

• def build_diciti(base): derive case insensitive dictionary class
• def Dicti(obj): create ci-dict instance using obj’s class as base
• class dicti = build_dicti(dict) standard ci-dict
• class odicti = build_odicti(OrderedDict) ordered ci-dict

Overview

Entries in a dicti can be accessed case invariantly:

keys = ['Hello', 'beautiful', 'world!']
values = [1, 2, 3]
z = list(zip(keys, values))
i = dicti(z)
assert "WorLD!" in i and "universe" not in i
assert i.get('hEllo') == 1

However, the in calls like .keys() or .items() the keys are returned as in their original case:

assert "Hello" in list(i.keys())

dicti can be “derived” from another custom dictionary extension using it as the underlying dictionary to gain additional properties like order preservation:

from collections import OrderedDict
odicti = build_dicti(OrderedDict)
oi = odicti(z)
assert list(oi.keys()) == keys

The equality comparison preserves the semantics of the base type and reflexitivity as best as possible. This has impact on the transitivity of the comparison operator:

rz = list(zip(reversed(keys), reversed(values)))
roi = odicti(rz)
assert roi == i and i == oi
assert oi != roi and roi != oi  # NOT transitive!
assert oi == i and i == oi      # reflexive

Be careful with reflexitivity when comparing to non-dicti types and even more so if both operands are not subclasses of each other. Here it is important to know about coercion rules. o == oli actually calls oli.__eq__(o) if oli is of a subclass of the type of of o. See:

http://docs.python.org/2/reference/datamodel.html#coercion-rules

>>> o = OrderedDict(oi)
>>> oli = Dicti(oi.lower_dict())
>>> assert oli == o and o == oli    # reflexive (coercion rules)
>>> print(o.__eq__(oli))            # dependends on OrderedDict.__eq__
False

Note that dicti is the type corresponding to builtins.dict:

assert build_dicti(dict) is dicti

The method Dicti is convenient for creating case insensitive dictionaries from a given object automatically using the objects type as the underlying dictionary type.

assert oi == Dicti(o)
assert type(oi) is type(Dicti(o))

The subclassing approach works well with “badly” written code as in json that checks for isinstance(dict):

import json
assert oi == json.loads(json.dumps(oi), object_pairs_hook=odicti)