🔒 is there a way to 'create and set if not exists' when accessing nested dictionaries

[bleak bane]

Apologies for the nooby question but I was just having some trouble finding out how to elegantly set things in my nested dicts

take this for example

self.my_dict['firstkey']['secondkey']['thirdkey'] = True

this would throw KeyError if 'firstkey' was not in the dictionaries keys..
and then it would do the same if 'secondkey' wasn't in that entries keys, you get the point.

Ideally when I ran this code if each key was not in place it would be automatically created without me having to write guards around everything to prevent KeyErrors..

am I missing something?

also as a bonus question is there any structure that exists that is like a dictionary but accepts ints as keys? because it's kind of annoying to put str() everywhere. thanks!

[exotic tinsel]

@bleak bane

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[solar ice]

>>> class rdd(defaultdict):
...     def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
...             super().__init__(rdd, *args, **kwargs)
... 
>>> x = rdd()
>>> x["a"]["b"]["c"]
rdd(<class '__main__.rdd'>, {})
>>> x
rdd(<class '__main__.rdd'>, {'a': rdd(<class '__main__.rdd'>, {'b': rdd(<class '__main__.rdd'>, {'c': rdd(<class '__main__.rdd'>, {})})})})
>>> x["a"]["b"]["c"]["d"] = True
>>> x
rdd(<class '__main__.rdd'>, {'a': rdd(<class '__main__.rdd'>, {'b': rdd(<class '__main__.rdd'>, {'c': rdd(<class '__main__.rdd'>, {'d': True})})})})

this is a defaultdict which exhibits the behavior you want, although it's probably not ideal due to the subclass

[bleak bane]

Thanks! :D

[solar ice]

Sure, but i am fairly sure there's a library out there that's actually well-tested and has better support in general

Problem is that i can't find one. I had this in mind, but it does additional transformation on your dicts and allows for dot-access as well which might not be what you want: https://github.com/cdgriffith/Box/wiki/Types-of-Boxes#default-box

[bleak bane]

no defaultdict is probably exactly what I want

I had heard of the "setdefault" and "getdefault" functions when I looked this stuff up

but this solves my question

[exotic tinsel]

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🔒 is there a way to 'create and set if not exists' when accessing nested dictionaries