Question

I am using the Counter class in Python to count the number of words in a key of a large python dictionary. I am creating a new dictionary with the keys being incremented numbers and the values being the return of the counter function. This is what my new dictionary looks like:

TP = {1:Counter({u'x':1, u'b':1, u'H':3}),2:Counter({u'j':1, u'm':4, u'e':2})...}

What I want to do, if possible, is remove the Counter and the parentheses ( and ) so that my dictionary looks like:

TP = {1:{u'x':1, u'b':1, u'H':3}, 2:{u'j':1, u'm':4, u'e':2}...}

If that’s not possible, can someone please tell me how to access the nested dictionaries inside the ()? Thank you

Answer 1

I don’t see any point of doing this, Counter is a subclass of dict and supports all of it’s methods so you should have no problems leaving it as is, although just for the sake of this question I will convert it back to a normal dict:

>>> from collections import Counter
>>> tp = {1:Counter({u'x':1, u'b':1, u'H':3}),2:Counter({u'j':1, u'm':4, u'e':2})}
>>> dict((k, dict(v)) for k, v in tp.iteritems())
{1: {u'x': 1, u'b': 1, u'H': 3}, 2: {u'e': 2, u'j': 1, u'm': 4}}

For Python 2.7+ (as suggested by @Blender)

{k: dict(v) for k, v in tp.iteritems()}

Iterating through subdictionaries eg:

for w, c in tp[1].iteritems():
    print w, c