I've got a problem that I can't seem to get my head around and hoped
somebody might help me out a bit:
I've got a dictionary, A, that is arbitarily large and may contains
ints, None and more dictionaries which themselves may contain ints,
None and more dictionaries. Each of the sub-dictionaries is also
arbitrarily large. When pretty printing A, in the context I'm using A
for, it's rather helpful to remove all key:value pairs where value is
None. So I'd like to be able to define a function dict_sweep to recurse
through A and del all the keys with None as a value.
I feel like the solution is right on the tip of my tounge, so to speak,
but I just can't quite get it. Anyway, here's the best I've come up
with:
def dict_sweep(dictionary, key_value):
"""Sweep through dictionary, deleting any key:value where
value is None.
"""
# Find key at position key_value.
key = dictionary.keys()[key_value]
# If the key value is a dictionary we want to move into it.
# Therefore we call rec_rem on dictionary[key] with a
# key_value of 0
if type(dictionary[key]) is type({}):
dict_sweep(dictionary[key], 0)
# If the value isn't a dictionary we care only that it's not None.
# If it is None we nuke it and call rec_rem on the current
# dictionary with key_value incrimented by one.
elif dictionary[key] is None:
del dictionary[key]
dict_sweep(dictionary, key_value+1)
# If the value isn't a dictionary and the value isn't None then
# we still want to walk through to the next value in the
# dictionary, so call rec_rem with key_value+1
else:
dict_sweep(dictionary, key_value+1)
Assuming dict_sweep worked perfectly it would take input like this:
A_in = {1: {2: 2, 3: {1: None, 2: 2}}, 2: 2, 3: None}
B_in = {1: {1: {1: None, 2: {1: None}}, 2: 2, 3: None}
and output this:
A_out = {1: {2: 2, 3: {2: 2}}, 2: 2}
B_out = {2:2}
This dict_sweep above obviously doesn't work and I'm rather afraid of
hitting python's recursion limit. Does anyone see a way to modify
dict_sweep in it's current state to perform dictionary sweeps like
this? What about a non-recursive implementation of dict_sweep?
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