On Wed, Sep 1, 2021 at 12:45 PM Kevin Mills <kevin.mills226@gmail.com> wrote:
d = {1: {2: {3: 4}}} keys= 1,2,3 print(d[*keys]) # Meaning: d[1][2][3] d[*keys] = None print(d)
This is a bad idea for a couple reasons. One reason MRAB points to. The `*keys` syntax is more-or-less equivalent to "substitute a tuple" in other Python contexts; you are proposing to give it a completely different meaning. This would be confusing and inconsistent. However, let's bracket the syntax for a moment. More important is that "nested" data comes in shapes other than strictly nested dictionaries. This seems to be most common in dealing with JSON data, but in concept it can arise elsewhere. A variety of libraries address this, with some small differences among them. Many are inspired by the semi-convention of "JSON Path" that is inspired by XPath for XML. For example, what if our data looks like this: data = {1: [{2: {3, 4}}, {5: {6,7}}, [8, 9, 0]]} It's not unreasonable to want to query that, and not uncommon to encounter similar things in the JSON world (I added a deliberately ugly inconsistency in the list of values associate with the key `1`; this is painful, but common, in the JSON world). A few libraries I find that try to handle this are: https://pypi.org/project/jmespath/ https://pypi.org/project/jsonpath-ng/ https://pypi.org/project/path-dict/ There are differences in their approaches, but crucially, none want or need changes to Python syntax. -- Keeping medicines from the bloodstreams of the sick; food from the bellies of the hungry; books from the hands of the uneducated; technology from the underdeveloped; and putting advocates of freedom in prisons. Intellectual property is to the 21st century what the slave trade was to the 16th.