Question

I want to make a dict int which you can access like that:

>>> my_dict["property'] = 3
>>> my_dict.property
3

So I’ve made this one:

class DictAsMember(dict):
    def __getattr__(self, name):
        return self[name]

This works fine, but if you have nested dicts it doesn’t work, e.g:

my_dict = DictAsMember()
my_dict["property"] = {'sub': 1}

I can access to my_dict.property but logically I can’t do my_dict.property.sub because property is a default dict, so what i want to do it’s overwrite the default dict, so you can use {}.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

One workaround to the problem is wrapping default dictionaries using DictAsMember before returning them in the __getattr__ method:

class DictAsMember(dict):
    def __getattr__(self, name):
        value = self[name]
        if isinstance(value, dict):
            value = DictAsMember(value)
        elif isinstance(value, list):
            value = [DictAsMember(element)
                     if isinstance(element, dict)
                     else element
                     for element in value]

        return value

my_dict = DictAsMember()
my_dict["property"] = {'sub': 1}
print my_dict.property.sub    # 1 will be printed

my_dict = DictAsMember()
my_dict["property"] = [{'name': 1}, {'name': 2}]
print my_dict.property[1].name    # 2 will be printed