Question

I am making a derived variant of the dict class such that a dictionary value can be accessed through attribute access syntax (so instead of doing dictionary[‘foo’] you could do dictionary.foo.) This is what I have so far:

class dict(dict): 
    __getattr__ = dict.__getitem__

However, this snippet of my code gives it problems:

eventD = {'rrule_end':None}
. . .
. . .
#(some time later)
print event.rrule_end

This is because the { } operators for dictionary creation have not been overloaded. Is it possible to make the dictName = { } syntax create an instance of my derived class instead of an ordinary dictionary?

Answer 1

No. You cannot override dict literal syntax. (You also can’t override list literal syntax, or string literal syntax, or number literal syntax, or any literal syntax.)

You have to create the instance of your class explicitly. Give your class a name like MyDict and then do

eventD = MyDict({'rrule_end':None})