Question

I very often need to do something like this:

"Some dictionary with values obtained somehow (e.g. submitted form values)"
my_dict = {
    'name': 'John',
    'surname': 'Doe',
    'age': 27,
    'hair_color': 'green',
}

"object person is some instance of class representing person"
person.name = my_dict['name']
person.surname = my_dict['surname']
person.age = my_dict['age']
person.hair_color = my_dict['hair_color']

I think this is a lot of repetition. What approach do you use?

Answer 1

for attr, val in my_dict.items():
    setattr(person, attr, val)

If my_dict might contain any keys that you don’t want to copy to person, create a list of keys you do want to copy and do something like this:

key_list = ['name', 'surname', 'age', 'hair_color']
for attr in key_list:
    setattr(person, attr, my_dict[attr])