Yet Another DotDict

A Python library providing attribute access for dictionaries. The library provides these classes:

• ya.dotdict.DotDict as a replacement for dict and collections.defaultdict
• ya.dotdict.DotDictMixin: a mixin class that can be used to add attribute-style access to any dict-like class. ya.dotdict.DotDict is implemented in terms of this mixin class

All the code examples assume:

>>> from ya.dotdict import *

Simple use case: access dictionary items as attributes

DotDict can be used as a replacement for dict:

>>> d = DotDict()
>>> d['spam'] = 'eggs'
>>> d.spam
'eggs'
>>> d.spam = 100
>>> d['spam']
100

Deleting attributes also works as expected:

>>> del d.spam
>>> d.spam
Traceback (most recent call last):
   ...
AttributeError: spam

Create default values (like collections.defaultdict)

DotDict can be used as a replacement for defaultict:

>>> d = DotDict(lambda: 'eggs')
>>> d.spam
'eggs'
>>> d.spam = 100
>>> d['spam']
100
>>> d._default_factory = lambda: 'foo'
>>> d.bar
'foo'

If the default value factory takes an argument, then the key is passed to it:

>>> d._default_factory = lambda key: [key, 1000]
>>> d.foo
['foo', 1000]

If the default value factory takes more than one argument, a TypeError will be raised:

>>> d._default_factory = lambda x, y: [x, y]
Traceback (most recent call last):
   ...
TypeError: defult_factory can only take zero or one argument

DotDictMixin

A mixin class to provide attribute access to dict-like classes. DotDict is implemented using DotDictMixin like this:

class DictClass(DotDictMixin, dict): pass