On Mon, Oct 07, 2013 at 06:17:09PM -0700, Mark Janssen wrote:
Sorry I missed the original discussion, but isn't this a simple case of putting a decorator around the getitem method (to transform the input key) and a single line in the body of the setitem method, making this very easy adaptation of the existing dict class?
Not really. We can try what you suggest to implement a case insensitive dict (decorator is not needed): py> class CaseInsensitiveDict(dict): ... def __getitem__(self, key): ... key = key.casefold() # use .lower() before Python 3.3 ... return super().__getitem__(key) ... def __setitem__(self, key, value): ... key = key.casefold() ... super().__setitem__(key, value) ... py> d = CaseInsensitiveDict() py> d['X'] = 42 py> d {'x': 42} Well, that's not exactly what I was hoping for... I was hoping that the dict would preserve case, rather than just convert it. But that's only the start of the problem: py> d['X'] # this works 42 py> d.pop('X') # expecting 42 Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> KeyError: 'X' So no, it isn't just a matter of a trivial wrapper around __getitem__, __setitem__ and __delitem__. Check the bug tracker for more detail: http://bugs.python.org/issue18986 -- Steven