Question

I need to create a tree-like structure in Python. I have a function get(parentId), which returns a list of objects with that parent — I think that should be done recursively.

The result should be something like this: ["root object", ["child1 of root", "child2 of root", ["child2-1", "child2-2"]]]

Every object has a attribute parent, which is is the parentId for get(), but as a starting point I only have the root object.

Answer 1

Assuming you are still interested in a list representation of the tree (which is not necessarily a useless thing to do), this is a recursive function definition that I believe does what you need (provided that the get() function has indeed been defined before):

def build_tree(node):
    return [node,[build_tree(child) for child in get(node)]]

You could use it in a way similar to this:

root = 1  # or whatever other representation you may use for root
list = build_tree(root)
print list