Question

I am getting myself all tangled up where in the nesting.

I have a list of python objects that look like this:

notes = [
     {'id':1,
      'title':'title1',
      'text':'bla1 bla1 bla1',
      'tags':['tag1a', ' tag1b', ' tag1c']},
     {'id':2,
      'title':'title2',
      'text':'bla2 bla2 bla2',
      'tags':[' tag2a', ' tag2b', ' tag2c']},
     {'id':3,
      'title':'title3',
      'text':'bla3 bla3 bla3',
      'tags':[' tag3a', ' tag3b', ' tag3c']}] 

and so on.

I am trying to go into each dictionary in the list and strip out the left whitespaces and return a list of dictionaries where the only difference are the tags have their uneccessary white space stripped.

The following code is what I am working with, but it is not right and I don’t know what I am doing to get to the result i need.

notes_cleaned = []
for objs in notes:
    for items in objs:
        notes_cleaned.append({'text':n['text'], 'id':n['id'], 'tags':[z.lstrip(' ') for z in n['tags']], 'title':n['title']})

Which gives me an error that i can’t use string indexes, which I understand, but I don’t know how to do it right. since I know that I have to iterate over each dictionary like:

for objs in notes:
    for items in objs:
        print items, objs[items]

but I am confused as to how to get to the final part of rebuilding the dictionaries while digging into the tag lists specifically.

What am I missing here (knowing that I am definitely missing something).

Answer 1

The following code should work, assuming only “tags” needs to be stripped:

def clean(items):
    clean = []
    for objs in items:
        nObj = {}
        for item, obj in objs.iteritems():
            if item != "tags":
                nObj[item] = obj
            else:
                nObj["tags"] = [n.lstrip() for n in obj]
        clean.append(nObj)
    return clean