This sounds to me like functionality of a specific type (more specific than `dict`). `dict` can have any key-value pairs, it is not necessarily a nested structure of dicts. Thus having a method for such a specific use case with the general dict type doesn't feel right.
I think it's better if such functionality is provided by whatever infrastructure creates those specific data structures (the nested dicts). For example there is this project: [pyhocon](https://github.com/chimpler/pyhocon/) , a HOCON parser for Python which supports exactly that syntax: conf['databases.mysql.host'] # conf is a nested dict of depth 3 Also writing a custom function isn't too much work: def dig(d, *keys, default=None): obj = d.get(keys[0], default) if len(keys) > 1: return dig(obj, *keys[1:], default=default) if isinstance(obj, dict) else default return obj _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/Q3Z4STN4VMNMKGMWB37WL3BLHETEKRDI/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
