python - Flatten nested dictionaries, compressing keys

Question

Suppose you have a dictionary like:

{'a': 1,
 'c': {'a': 2,
       'b': {'x': 5,
             'y' : 10}},
 'd': [1, 2, 3]}

How would you go about flattening that into something like:

{'a': 1,
 'c_a': 2,
 'c_b_x': 5,
 'c_b_y': 10,
 'd': [1, 2, 3]}

Answer 1

Basically the same way you would flatten a nested list, you just have to do the extra work for iterating the dict by key/value, creating new keys for your new dictionary and creating the dictionary at final step.

import collections

def flatten(d, parent_key='', sep='_'):
    items = []
    for k, v in d.items():
        new_key = parent_key + sep + k if parent_key else k
        if isinstance(v, collections.MutableMapping):
            items.extend(flatten(v, new_key, sep=sep).items())
        else:
            items.append((new_key, v))
    return dict(items)

>>> flatten({'a': 1, 'c': {'a': 2, 'b': {'x': 5, 'y' : 10}}, 'd': [1, 2, 3]})
{'a': 1, 'c_a': 2, 'c_b_x': 5, 'd': [1, 2, 3], 'c_b_y': 10}