Creating a nested dictionary from a flattened dictionary

Question

I have a flattened dictionary which I want to make into a nested one, of the form

flat = {\'X_a_one\': 10,
        \'X_a_two\': 20, 
        \'X_b_one\': 10,         


        

Answer 1

Here is a reasonably readable recursive result:

def unflatten_dict(a, result=None, sep='_'):

    if result is None:
        result = dict()

    for k, v in a.items():
        k, *rest = k.split(sep, 1)
        if rest:
            unflatten_dict({rest[0]: v}, result.setdefault(k, {}), sep=sep)
        else:
            result[k] = v

    return result


flat = {'X_a_one': 10,
        'X_a_two': 20,
        'X_b_one': 10,
        'X_b_two': 20,
        'Y_a_one': 10,
        'Y_a_two': 20,
        'Y_b_one': 10,
        'Y_b_two': 20}

print(unflatten_dict(flat))
{'X': {'a': {'one': 10, 'two': 20}, 'b': {'one': 10, 'two': 20}}, 
 'Y': {'a': {'one': 10, 'two': 20}, 'b': {'one': 10, 'two': 20}}}

This is based on a couple of the above answers, uses no imports and is only tested in python 3.