FlatDict

FlatDict is a dict object that allows for single level, delimited key/value pair mapping of nested dictionaries. You can interact with FlatDict like a normal dictionary and access child dicts as you normally would or with the composited key.

For example:

foo = {'foo': {'bar': 'baz', 'qux': 'corge'}}

is represented as:

{'foo:bar': 'baz',
 'foo:qux': 'corge'}

And can still be accessed as:

foo['foo']['bar']

and

foo['foo:bar']

Additionally, lists and tuples are also converted into dicts using enumerate().

For example:

d = {'list': ['a', 'b', 'c',]}

Will be flattened as follows:

flat = {'list:0': 'a', 'list:1': 'b', 'list:2': 'c'}

API

FlatDict has the same methods as dict in Python 2.6. In addition, it has a FlatDict.as_dict method which will return a pure nested dictionary from a FlatDict value.

Documentation is available at http://flatdict.readthedocs.org

Installation

$ pip install flatdict

Example Use

import flatdict

values = {'foo': {'bar': {'baz': 0,
                          'qux': 1,
                          'corge': 2},
                  'grault': {'baz': 3,
                             'qux': 4,
                             'corge': 5}},
          'garply': {'foo': 0, 'bar': 1, 'baz': 2, 'qux': {'corge': 3}}}

flat = flatdict.FlatDict(values)

print flat['foo:bar:baz']

flat['test:value:key'] = 10

del flat['test']

for key in flat:
    print key

for values in flat.itervalues():
    print key

print repr(flat.as_dict())