Find all occurrences of a key in nested python dic

Question

I have a dictionary like this:

{ "id" : "abcde",
  "key1" : "blah",
  "key2" : "blah blah",
  "nestedlist" : [ 
    { "id" : "qwerty",
      "nestednestedlist" : [ 
        { "id" : "xyz",
          "keyA" : "blah blah blah" },
        { "id" : "fghi",
          "keyZ" : "blah blah blah" }],
      "anothernestednestedlist" : [ 
        { "id" : "asdf",
          "keyQ" : "blah blah" },
        { "id" : "yuiop",
          "keyW" : "blah" }] } ] } 

Basically a dictionary with nested lists, dictionaries and strings, of arbitrary depth.

What is the best way of traversing this to extract the values of every "id" key? I want to achieve the equivalent of an XPath query like "//id". The value of "id" is always a string.

So from my example, the output I need is basically:

["abcde", "qwerty", "xyz", "fghi", "asdf", "yuiop"]

Order is not important.

Answer 1

I just wanted to iterate on @hexerei-software's excellent answer using yield from and accepting top-level lists.

def gen_dict_extract(var, key):
    if isinstance(var, dict):
        for k, v in var.items():
            if k == key:
                yield v
            if isinstance(v, (dict, list)):
                yield from gen_dict_extract(v, key)
    elif isinstance(var, list):
        for d in var:
            yield from gen_dict_extract(d, key)

Answer 2

I found this Q/A very interesting, since it provides several different solutions for the same problem. I took all these functions and tested them with a complex dictionary object. I had to take two functions out of the test, because they had to many fail results and they did not support returning lists or dicts as values, which i find essential, since a function should be prepared for almost any data to come.

So i pumped the other functions in 100.000 iterations through the timeit module and output came to following result:

0.11 usec/pass on gen_dict_extract(k,o)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
6.03 usec/pass on find_all_items(k,o)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
0.15 usec/pass on findkeys(k,o)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
1.79 usec/pass on get_recursively(k,o)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
0.14 usec/pass on find(k,o)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
0.36 usec/pass on dict_extract(k,o)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

All functions had the same needle to search for ('logging') and the same dictionary object, which is constructed like this:

o = { 'temparature': '50', 
      'logging': {
        'handlers': {
          'console': {
            'formatter': 'simple', 
            'class': 'logging.StreamHandler', 
            'stream': 'ext://sys.stdout', 
            'level': 'DEBUG'
          }
        },
        'loggers': {
          'simpleExample': {
            'handlers': ['console'], 
            'propagate': 'no', 
            'level': 'INFO'
          },
         'root': {
           'handlers': ['console'], 
           'level': 'DEBUG'
         }
       }, 
       'version': '1', 
       'formatters': {
         'simple': {
           'datefmt': "'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'", 
           'format': '%(asctime)s - %(name)s - %(levelname)s - %(message)s'
         }
       }
     }, 
     'treatment': {'second': 5, 'last': 4, 'first': 4},   
     'treatment_plan': [[4, 5, 4], [4, 5, 4], [5, 5, 5]]
}

All functions delivered the same result, but the time differences are dramatic! The function gen_dict_extract(k,o) is my function adapted from the functions here, actually it is pretty much like the find function from Alfe, with the main difference, that i am checking if the given object has iteritems function, in case strings are passed during recursion:

def gen_dict_extract(key, var):
    if hasattr(var,'iteritems'):
        for k, v in var.iteritems():
            if k == key:
                yield v
            if isinstance(v, dict):
                for result in gen_dict_extract(key, v):
                    yield result
            elif isinstance(v, list):
                for d in v:
                    for result in gen_dict_extract(key, d):
                        yield result

So this variant is the fastest and safest of the functions here. And find_all_items is incredibly slow and far off the second slowest get_recursivley while the rest, except dict_extract, is close to each other. The functions fun and keyHole only work if you are looking for strings.

Interesting learning aspect here :)

Answer 3

d = { "id" : "abcde",
    "key1" : "blah",
    "key2" : "blah blah",
    "nestedlist" : [
    { "id" : "qwerty",
        "nestednestedlist" : [
        { "id" : "xyz", "keyA" : "blah blah blah" },
        { "id" : "fghi", "keyZ" : "blah blah blah" }],
        "anothernestednestedlist" : [
        { "id" : "asdf", "keyQ" : "blah blah" },
        { "id" : "yuiop", "keyW" : "blah" }] } ] }


def findkeys(node, kv):
    if isinstance(node, list):
        for i in node:
            for x in findkeys(i, kv):
               yield x
    elif isinstance(node, dict):
        if kv in node:
            yield node[kv]
        for j in node.values():
            for x in findkeys(j, kv):
                yield x

print list(findkeys(d, 'id'))

Answer 4

def find(key, value):
  for k, v in value.iteritems():
    if k == key:
      yield v
    elif isinstance(v, dict):
      for result in find(key, v):
        yield result
    elif isinstance(v, list):
      for d in v:
        for result in find(key, d):
          yield result

Answer 5

Here is my stab at it:

def keyHole(k2b,o):
  # print "Checking for %s in "%k2b,o
  if isinstance(o, dict):
    for k, v in o.iteritems():
      if k == k2b and not hasattr(v, '__iter__'): yield v
      else:
        for r in  keyHole(k2b,v): yield r
  elif hasattr(o, '__iter__'):
    for r in [ keyHole(k2b,i) for i in o ]:
      for r2 in r: yield r2
  return

Ex.:

>>> findMe = {'Me':{'a':2,'Me':'bop'},'z':{'Me':4}}
>>> keyHole('Me',findMe)
<generator object keyHole at 0x105eccb90>
>>> [ x for x in keyHole('Me',findMe) ]
['bop', 4]

Answer 6

Another variation, which includes the nested path to the found results (note: this version doesn't consider lists):

def find_all_items(obj, key, keys=None):
    """
    Example of use:
    d = {'a': 1, 'b': 2, 'c': {'a': 3, 'd': 4, 'e': {'a': 9, 'b': 3}, 'j': {'c': 4}}}
    for k, v in find_all_items(d, 'a'):
        print "* {} = {} *".format('->'.join(k), v)    
    """
    ret = []
    if not keys:
        keys = []
    if key in obj:
        out_keys = keys + [key]
        ret.append((out_keys, obj[key]))
    for k, v in obj.items():
        if isinstance(v, dict):
            found_items = find_all_items(v, key, keys=(keys+[k]))
            ret += found_items
    return ret