Django equivalent of PHP's form value array/associative array

Question

In PHP, I would do this to get name as an array.

Answer 1

Check out the QueryDict documentation, particularly the usage of QueryDict.getlist(key).

Since request.POST and request.GET in the view are instances of QueryDict, you could do this:

<form action='/my/path/' method='POST'>
<input type='text' name='hi' value='heya1'>
<input type='text' name='hi' value='heya2'>
<input type='submit' value='Go'>
</form>

Then something like this:

def mypath(request):
    if request.method == 'POST':
        greetings = request.POST.getlist('hi') # will be ['heya1','heya2']

Answer 2

Django does not provide a way to get associative arrays (dictionaries in Python) from the request object. As the first answer pointed out, you can use .getlist() as needed, or write a function that can take a QueryDict and reorganize it to your liking (pulling out key/value pairs if the key matches some key[*] pattern, for example).

Answer 3

Sorry for digging this up, but Django has an utils.datastructures.DotExpandedDict. Here's a piece of it's docs:

>>> d = DotExpandedDict({'person.1.firstname': ['Simon'], \
        'person.1.lastname': ['Willison'], \
        'person.2.firstname': ['Adrian'], \
        'person.2.lastname': ['Holovaty']})
>>> d
{'person': {'1': {'lastname': ['Willison'], 'firstname': ['Simon']}, '2': {'lastname': ['Holovaty'], 'firstname': ['Adrian']}}}

The only difference being you use dot's instead of brackets.

EDIT: This mechanism was replaced by form prefixes, but here's the old code you can drop in your app if you still want to use this concept: https://gist.github.com/grzes/73142ed99dc8ad6ac4fc9fb9f4e87d60