What is the best way to implement nested dictionaries?

Question

I have a data structure which essentially amounts to a nested dictionary. Let's say it looks like this:

{'new jersey': {'mercer county': {'plumbers': 3,
                                  'programmers': 81},
                'middlesex county': {'programmers': 81,
                                     'salesmen': 62}},
 'new york': {'queens county': {'plumbers': 9,
                                'salesmen': 36}}}

Now, maintaining and creating this is pretty painful; every time I have a new state/county/profession I have to create the lower layer dictionaries via obnoxious try/catch blocks. Moreover, I have to create annoying nested iterators if I want to go over all the values.

I could also use tuples as keys, like such:

{('new jersey', 'mercer county', 'plumbers'): 3,
 ('new jersey', 'mercer county', 'programmers'): 81,
 ('new jersey', 'middlesex county', 'programmers'): 81,
 ('new jersey', 'middlesex county', 'salesmen'): 62,
 ('new york', 'queens county', 'plumbers'): 9,
 ('new york', 'queens county', 'salesmen'): 36}

This makes iterating over the values very simple and natural, but it is more syntactically painful to do things like aggregations and looking at subsets of the dictionary (e.g. if I just want to go state-by-state).

Basically, sometimes I want to think of a nested dictionary as a flat dictionary, and sometimes I want to think of it indeed as a complex hierarchy. I could wrap this all in a class, but it seems like someone might have done this already. Alternatively, it seems like there might be some really elegant syntactical constructions to do this.

How could I do this better?

Addendum: I'm aware of setdefault() but it doesn't really make for clean syntax. Also, each sub-dictionary you create still needs to have setdefault() manually set.

Answer 1

class AutoVivification(dict):
    """Implementation of perl's autovivification feature."""
    def __getitem__(self, item):
        try:
            return dict.__getitem__(self, item)
        except KeyError:
            value = self[item] = type(self)()
            return value

Testing:

a = AutoVivification()

a[1][2][3] = 4
a[1][3][3] = 5
a[1][2]['test'] = 6

print a

Output:

{1: {2: {'test': 6, 3: 4}, 3: {3: 5}}}