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

Simple function to flatten nested dictionaries. For Python 3, replace .iteritems() with .items()

def flatten_dict(init_dict):
    res_dict = {}
    if type(init_dict) is not dict:
        return res_dict

    for k, v in init_dict.iteritems():
        if type(v) == dict:
            res_dict.update(flatten_dict(v))
        else:
            res_dict[k] = v

    return res_dict

The idea/requirement was: Get flat dictionaries with no keeping parent keys.

Example of usage:

dd = {'a': 3, 
      'b': {'c': 4, 'd': 5}, 
      'e': {'f': 
                 {'g': 1, 'h': 2}
           }, 
      'i': 9,
     }

flatten_dict(dd)

>> {'a': 3, 'c': 4, 'd': 5, 'g': 1, 'h': 2, 'i': 9}

Keeping parent keys is simple as well.