How to access deeply nested dictionaries in Swift

Question

I have a pretty complex data structure in my app, which I need to manipulate. I am trying to keep track of how many types of bugs a player has in thier garden. There are ten types of bugs, each with ten patterns, each pattern having ten colors. So there are 1000 unique bugs possible, and I want to track how many of each of these types the player has. The nested dictionary looks like:

var colorsDict: [String : Int]
var patternsDict: [String : Any] // [String : colorsDict]
var bugsDict: [String : Any] // [String : patternsDict]

I do not get any errors or complaints with this syntax.

When I want to increment the player's bug collection though, doing this:

bugs["ladybug"]["spotted"]["red"]++

I get this error: String is not convertible to 'DictionaryIndex< String, Any >' with the error's carrot under the first string.

Another similar post suggested using "as Any?" in the code, but the OP of that post only had a dictionary one deep so could do that easily with: dict["string"] as Any? ...

I am not sure how to do this with a multilevel dictionary. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

When working with dictionaries you have to remember that a key might not exist in the dictionary. For this reason, dictionaries always return optionals. So each time you access the dictionary by key you have to unwrap at each level as follows:

bugsDict["ladybug"]!["spotted"]!["red"]!++

I presume you know about optionals, but just to be clear, use the exclamation mark if you are 100% sure the key exists in the dictionary, otherwise it's better to use the question mark:

bugsDict["ladybug"]?["spotted"]?["red"]?++

Addendum: This is the code I used for testing in playground:

var colorsDict = [String : Int]()
var patternsDict =  [String : [String : Int]] ()
var bugsDict = [String : [String : [String : Int]]] ()

colorsDict["red"] = 1
patternsDict["spotted"] = colorsDict
bugsDict["ladybug"] = patternsDict


bugsDict["ladybug"]!["spotted"]!["red"]!++ // Prints 1
bugsDict["ladybug"]!["spotted"]!["red"]!++ // Prints 2
bugsDict["ladybug"]!["spotted"]!["red"]!++ // Prints 3
bugsDict["ladybug"]!["spotted"]!["red"]! // Prints 4