Question

I’m trying to convert the data from a simple object graph into a dictionary. I don’t need type information or methods and I don’t need to be able to convert it back to an object again.

I found this question about creating a dictionary from an object’s fields, but it doesn’t do it recursively.

Being relatively new to python, I’m concerned that my solution may be ugly, or unpythonic, or broken in some obscure way, or just plain old NIH.

My first attempt appeared to work until I tried it with lists and dictionaries, and it seemed easier just to check if the object passed had an internal dictionary, and if not, to just treat it as a value (rather than doing all that isinstance checking). My previous attempts also didn’t recurse into lists of objects:

def todict(obj):
    if hasattr(obj, "__iter__"):
        return [todict(v) for v in obj]
    elif hasattr(obj, "__dict__"):
        return dict([(key, todict(value)) 
            for key, value in obj.__dict__.iteritems() 
            if not callable(value) and not key.startswith('_')])
    else:
        return obj

This seems to work better and doesn’t require exceptions, but again I’m still not sure if there are cases here I’m not aware of where it falls down.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

An amalgamation of my own attempt and clues derived from Anurag Uniyal and Lennart Regebro’s answers works best for me:

def todict(obj, classkey=None):
    if isinstance(obj, dict):
        data = {}
        for (k, v) in obj.items():
            data[k] = todict(v, classkey)
        return data
    elif hasattr(obj, "_ast"):
        return todict(obj._ast())
    elif hasattr(obj, "__iter__") and not isinstance(obj, str):
        return [todict(v, classkey) for v in obj]
    elif hasattr(obj, "__dict__"):
        data = dict([(key, todict(value, classkey)) 
            for key, value in obj.__dict__.items() 
            if not callable(value) and not key.startswith('_')])
        if classkey is not None and hasattr(obj, "__class__"):
            data[classkey] = obj.__class__.__name__
        return data
    else:
        return obj