Question

I’m new here and pretty new to python!

We got a homework, and I already was able to do rest of it, but one problem remains:
If I have a tree hierarchy like this:

root = [
    parent1 = [
        child1,
        child2 = [
            sub_child
        ]
        child3
    ],
    parent2 = [
        child1,
        child2
    ]
]

And they are all instances of one class named TreeHierarchyClass, and they all have a name attribute, how can I find the one with name I input?

I tried to use for loops but there’s no way to know how many I need? Getting the name is easy:

name = input("Enter name: ")
if name == TreeHierarchyObject.name:
    print("Found it!")

but how do I loop through the objects?

Answer 1

You should use simple recursion here.
The method depends a little on how your child objects are attached to the parent object.

This one works if they are in a list self.children, which I’d recommend to do.
Just define the following method inside your class:

def findObjectByName(self, name):
    if self.name == name:
        return self
    else:
        for child in self.children:
            match = child.findObjectByName(name)
            if match:
                return match

Edit:
To make this work for any attribute, not just name, use getattr() instead:

def findObject(self, attr, value):
    if getattr(self, attr) == value:
        return self
    else:
        for child in self.children:
            match = child.findObject(attr, value)
            if match:
                return match

And simply call root.findObjectByName("Sub Child!") or to use the second method: root.findObject("name", "Sub Child!")