How to "perfectly" override a dict?

Question

How can I make as "perfect" a subclass of dict as possible? The end goal is to have a simple dict in which the keys are lowercase.

It would seem that there should be some tiny set of primitives I can override to make this work, but according to all my research and attempts it seem like this isn't the case:

• If I override __getitem__/__setitem__, then get/set don't work. How can I make them work? Surely I don't need to implement them individually?

• Am I preventing pickling from working, and do I need to implement __setstate__ etc?

• Do I need repr, update and __init__?

• Should I just use mutablemapping (it seems one shouldn't use UserDict or DictMixin)? If so, how? The docs aren't exactly enlightening.

Here is my first go at it, get() doesn't work and no doubt there are many other minor problems:

class arbitrary_dict(dict):
    """A dictionary that applies an arbitrary key-altering function
       before accessing the keys."""

    def __keytransform__(self, key):
        return key

    # Overridden methods. List from 
    # https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2390827/how-to-properly-subclass-dict

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.update(*args, **kwargs)

    # Note: I'm using dict directly, since super(dict, self) doesn't work.
    # I'm not sure why, perhaps dict is not a new-style class.

    def __getitem__(self, key):
        return dict.__getitem__(self, self.__keytransform__(key))

    def __setitem__(self, key, value):
        return dict.__setitem__(self, self.__keytransform__(key), value)

    def __delitem__(self, key):
        return dict.__delitem__(self, self.__keytransform__(key))

    def __contains__(self, key):
        return dict.__contains__(self, self.__keytransform__(key))


class lcdict(arbitrary_dict):
    def __keytransform__(self, key):
        return str(key).lower()

Answer 1

You can write an object that behaves like a dict quite easily with ABCs (Abstract Base Classes) from the collections.abc module. It even tells you if you missed a method, so below is the minimal version that shuts the ABC up.

from collections.abc import MutableMapping


class TransformedDict(MutableMapping):
    """A dictionary that applies an arbitrary key-altering
       function before accessing the keys"""

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.store = dict()
        self.update(dict(*args, **kwargs))  # use the free update to set keys

    def __getitem__(self, key):
        return self.store[self._keytransform(key)]

    def __setitem__(self, key, value):
        self.store[self._keytransform(key)] = value

    def __delitem__(self, key):
        del self.store[self._keytransform(key)]

    def __iter__(self):
        return iter(self.store)
    
    def __len__(self):
        return len(self.store)

    def _keytransform(self, key):
        return key

You get a few free methods from the ABC:

class MyTransformedDict(TransformedDict):

    def _keytransform(self, key):
        return key.lower()


s = MyTransformedDict([('Test', 'test')])

assert s.get('TEST') is s['test']   # free get
assert 'TeSt' in s                  # free __contains__
                                    # free setdefault, __eq__, and so on

import pickle
# works too since we just use a normal dict
assert pickle.loads(pickle.dumps(s)) == s

I wouldn't subclass dict (or other builtins) directly. It often makes no sense, because what you actually want to do is implement the interface of a dict. And that is exactly what ABCs are for.