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]}

Ho

Answer 1

This is not restricted to dictionaries, but every mapping type that implements .items(). Further ist faster as it avoides an if condition. Nevertheless credits go to Imran:

def flatten(d, parent_key=''):
    items = []
    for k, v in d.items():
        try:
            items.extend(flatten(v, '%s%s_' % (parent_key, k)).items())
        except AttributeError:
            items.append(('%s%s' % (parent_key, k), v))
    return dict(items)