Elegant way to remove fields from nested dictionaries

Question

I had to remove some fields from a dictionary, the keys for those fields are on a list. So I wrote this function:

def delete_keys_from_dict(dict_del, lst_key         


        

Answer 1

def delete_keys_from_dict(d, to_delete):
    if isinstance(to_delete, str):
        to_delete = [to_delete]
    if isinstance(d, dict):
        for single_to_delete in set(to_delete):
            if single_to_delete in d:
                del d[single_to_delete]
        for k, v in d.items():
            delete_keys_from_dict(v, to_delete)
    elif isinstance(d, list):
        for i in d:
            delete_keys_from_dict(i, to_delete)
    return d

d = {'a': 10, 'b': [{'c': 10, 'd': 10, 'a': 10}, {'a': 10}], 'c': 1 }
delete_keys_from_dict(d, ['a', 'c']) 

>>> {'b': [{'d': 10}, {}]}

This solution works for dict and list in a given nested dict. The input to_delete can be a list of str to be deleted or a single str.

Plese note, that if you remove the only key in a dict, you will get an empty dict.