How to use a dot “.” to access members of dictiona

Question

How do I make Python dictionary members accessible via a dot "."?

For example, instead of writing mydict['val'], I'd like to write mydict.val.

Also I'd like to access nested dicts this way. For example

mydict.mydict2.val 

would refer to

mydict = { 'mydict2': { 'val': ... } }

Answer 1

I ended up trying BOTH the AttrDict and the Bunch libraries and found them to be way to slow for my uses. After a friend and I looked into it, we found that the main method for writing these libraries results in the library aggressively recursing through a nested object and making copies of the dictionary object throughout. With this in mind, we made two key changes. 1) We made attributes lazy-loaded 2) instead of creating copies of a dictionary object, we create copies of a light-weight proxy object. This is the final implementation. The performance increase of using this code is incredible. When using AttrDict or Bunch, these two libraries alone consumed 1/2 and 1/3 respectively of my request time(what!?). This code reduced that time to almost nothing(somewhere in the range of 0.5ms). This of course depends on your needs, but if you are using this functionality quite a bit in your code, definitely go with something simple like this.

class DictProxy(object):
    def __init__(self, obj):
        self.obj = obj

    def __getitem__(self, key):
        return wrap(self.obj[key])

    def __getattr__(self, key):
        try:
            return wrap(getattr(self.obj, key))
        except AttributeError:
            try:
                return self[key]
            except KeyError:
                raise AttributeError(key)

    # you probably also want to proxy important list properties along like
    # items(), iteritems() and __len__

class ListProxy(object):
    def __init__(self, obj):
        self.obj = obj

    def __getitem__(self, key):
        return wrap(self.obj[key])

    # you probably also want to proxy important list properties along like
    # __iter__ and __len__

def wrap(value):
    if isinstance(value, dict):
        return DictProxy(value)
    if isinstance(value, (tuple, list)):
        return ListProxy(value)
    return value

See the original implementation here by https://stackoverflow.com/users/704327/michael-merickel.

The other thing to note, is that this implementation is pretty simple and doesn't implement all of the methods you might need. You'll need to write those as required on the DictProxy or ListProxy objects.

Answer 2

Derive from dict and and implement __getattr__ and __setattr__.

Or you can use Bunch which is very similar.

I don't think it's possible to monkeypatch built-in dict class.

Answer 3

Fabric has a really nice, minimal implementation. Extending that to allow for nested access, we can use a defaultdict, and the result looks something like this:

from collections import defaultdict

class AttributeDict(defaultdict):
    def __init__(self):
        super(AttributeDict, self).__init__(AttributeDict)

    def __getattr__(self, key):
        try:
            return self[key]
        except KeyError:
            raise AttributeError(key)

    def __setattr__(self, key, value):
        self[key] = value

Make use of it as follows:

keys = AttributeDict()
keys.abc.xyz.x = 123
keys.abc.xyz.a.b.c = 234

That elaborates a bit on Kugel's answer of "Derive from dict and and implement __getattr__ and __setattr__". Now you know how!

Answer 4

Not a direct answer to the OP's question, but inspired by and perhaps useful for some.. I've created an object-based solution using the internal __dict__ (In no way optimized code)

payload = {
    "name": "John",
    "location": {
        "lat": 53.12312312,
        "long": 43.21345112
    },
    "numbers": [
        {
            "role": "home",
            "number": "070-12345678"
        },
        {
            "role": "office",
            "number": "070-12345679"
        }
    ]
}


class Map(object):
    """
    Dot style access to object members, access raw values
    with an underscore e.g.

    class Foo(Map):
        def foo(self):
            return self.get('foo') + 'bar'

    obj = Foo(**{'foo': 'foo'})

    obj.foo => 'foobar'
    obj._foo => 'foo'

    """

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        for arg in args:
            if isinstance(arg, dict):
                for k, v in arg.iteritems():
                    self.__dict__[k] = v
                    self.__dict__['_' + k] = v

        if kwargs:
            for k, v in kwargs.iteritems():
                self.__dict__[k] = v
                self.__dict__['_' + k] = v

    def __getattribute__(self, attr):
        if hasattr(self, 'get_' + attr):
            return object.__getattribute__(self, 'get_' + attr)()
        else:
            return object.__getattribute__(self, attr)

    def get(self, key):
        try:
            return self.__dict__.get('get_' + key)()
        except (AttributeError, TypeError):
            return self.__dict__.get(key)

    def __repr__(self):
        return u"<{name} object>".format(
            name=self.__class__.__name__
        )


class Number(Map):
    def get_role(self):
        return self.get('role')

    def get_number(self):
        return self.get('number')


class Location(Map):
    def get_latitude(self):
        return self.get('lat') + 1

    def get_longitude(self):
        return self.get('long') + 1


class Item(Map):
    def get_name(self):
        return self.get('name') + " Doe"

    def get_location(self):
        return Location(**self.get('location'))

    def get_numbers(self):
        return [Number(**n) for n in self.get('numbers')]


# Tests

obj = Item({'foo': 'bar'}, **payload)

assert type(obj) == Item
assert obj._name == "John"
assert obj.name == "John Doe"
assert type(obj.location) == Location
assert obj.location._lat == 53.12312312
assert obj.location._long == 43.21345112
assert obj.location.latitude == 54.12312312
assert obj.location.longitude == 44.21345112

for n in obj.numbers:
    assert type(n) == Number
    if n.role == 'home':
        assert n.number == "070-12345678"
    if n.role == 'office':
        assert n.number == "070-12345679"

Answer 5

I've always kept this around in a util file. You can use it as a mixin on your own classes too.

class dotdict(dict):
    """dot.notation access to dictionary attributes"""
    __getattr__ = dict.get
    __setattr__ = dict.__setitem__
    __delattr__ = dict.__delitem__

mydict = {'val':'it works'}
nested_dict = {'val':'nested works too'}
mydict = dotdict(mydict)
mydict.val
# 'it works'

mydict.nested = dotdict(nested_dict)
mydict.nested.val
# 'nested works too'

Answer 6

You can do it using this class I just made. With this class you can use the Map object like another dictionary(including json serialization) or with the dot notation. I hope to help you:

class Map(dict):
    """
    Example:
    m = Map({'first_name': 'Eduardo'}, last_name='Pool', age=24, sports=['Soccer'])
    """
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(Map, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        for arg in args:
            if isinstance(arg, dict):
                for k, v in arg.iteritems():
                    self[k] = v

        if kwargs:
            for k, v in kwargs.iteritems():
                self[k] = v

    def __getattr__(self, attr):
        return self.get(attr)

    def __setattr__(self, key, value):
        self.__setitem__(key, value)

    def __setitem__(self, key, value):
        super(Map, self).__setitem__(key, value)
        self.__dict__.update({key: value})

    def __delattr__(self, item):
        self.__delitem__(item)

    def __delitem__(self, key):
        super(Map, self).__delitem__(key)
        del self.__dict__[key]

Usage examples:

m = Map({'first_name': 'Eduardo'}, last_name='Pool', age=24, sports=['Soccer'])
# Add new key
m.new_key = 'Hello world!'
# Or
m['new_key'] = 'Hello world!'
print m.new_key
print m['new_key']
# Update values
m.new_key = 'Yay!'
# Or
m['new_key'] = 'Yay!'
# Delete key
del m.new_key
# Or
del m['new_key']