Dictionaries

Gregor von Laszewski (laszewski@gmail.com)

Dotdict

For simple dictionaries we sometimes like to simplify the notation with a . instead of using the []:

You can achieve this with dotdict

from cloudmesh.common.dotdict import dotdict

data = {
    "name": "Gregor"
}

data = dotdict(data)

Now you can either call

data["name"]

or

data.name

This is especially useful in if conditions as it may be easier to read and write

if data.name is "Gregor":

    print("this is quite readable")

and is the same as

if data["name"] is "Gregor":

    print("this is quite readable")

For more features, see API: dotdict

FlatDict

In some cases, it is useful to be able to flatten out dictionaries that contain dicts within dicts. For this, we can use FlatDict.

from cloudmesh.common.Flatdict import FlatDict

data = {
    "name": "Gregor",
    "address": {
        "city": "Bloomington",
        "state": "IN"

    }
}

flat = FlatDict(data, sep=".")

This will be converted to a dict with the following structure.

flat = {
    "name": "Gregor"
    "address.city": "Bloomington",
    "address.state": "IN"
}

With sep you can change the sepaerator between the nested dict attributes. For more features, see API: dotdict

Printing Dicts

In case we want to print dicts and lists of dicts in various formats, we have included a simple Printer that can print a dict in yaml, json, table, and csv format.

The function can even guess from the passed parameters what the input format is and uses the appropriate internal function.

A common example is

from pprint import pprint
from cloudmesh.common.Printer import Printer

data = [
    {
        "name": "Gregor",
        "address": {
            "street": "Funny Lane 11",
            "city": "Cloudville"
        }
    },
    {
        "name": "Albert",
        "address": {
            "street": "Memory Lane 1901",
            "city": "Cloudnine"
        }
    }
]


pprint(data)

table = Printer.flatwrite(data,
                          sort_keys=["name"],
                          order=["name", "address.street", "address.city"],
                          header=["Name", "Street", "City"],
                          output='table')

print(table)

For more features, see API: Printer

More examples are available in the source code as tests