Terry Jones

I quite often miss the flexibility of autovivification in Python. That Wikipedia link shows a cute way to get what Perl has:

from collections import defaultdict

def tree():
    return defaultdict(tree)

lupin = tree()
lupin["express"][3] = "stand and deliver"

It’s interesting to think about what’s going on in the above code and why it works. I really like defaultdict.

What I more often want, though, is not infinitely deep nested dictionaries like the above, but a (known) finite number of nested defaultdicts with a specific type at the final level. Here’s a tiny function I wrote to get just that:

from collections import defaultdict

def autovivify(levels=1, final=dict):
    return (defaultdict(final) if levels < 2 else
            defaultdict(lambda: autovivify(levels - 1, final)))

So let's say you were counting the number of occurrences of words said by people by year, month, and day in a chat room. You'd write:

words = autovivify(5, int)

words["sam"][2012][5][25]["hello"] += 1
words["sue"][2012][5][24]["today"] += 1

Etc. It's pretty trivial, but it was fun to think about how to do it with a function and to play with some alternatives. You could do it manually with nested lambdas:

words = defaultdict(lambda: defaultdict(int))
words["sam"]["hello"] += 1

But that gets messy quickly and isn't nearly as much fun.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.