Is there a way to define a XPath type query for nested python dictionaries.
Something like this:
foo = {
'spam':'eggs',
'morefoo': {
'bar':'soap',
'morebar': {'bacon' : 'foobar'}
}
}
print( foo.select("/morefoo/morebar") )
>> {'bacon' : 'foobar'}
I also needed to select nested lists ;)
This can be done easily with @jellybean's solution:
def xpath_get(mydict, path):
elem = mydict
try:
for x in path.strip("/").split("/"):
try:
x = int(x)
elem = elem[x]
except ValueError:
elem = elem.get(x)
except:
pass
return elem
foo = {
'spam':'eggs',
'morefoo': [{
'bar':'soap',
'morebar': {
'bacon' : {
'bla':'balbla'
}
}
},
'bla'
]
}
print xpath_get(foo, "/morefoo/0/morebar/bacon")
[EDIT 2016] This question and the accepted answer are ancient. The newer answers may do the job better than the original answer. However I did not test them so I won't change the accepted answer.
One of the best libraries I've been able to identify, which, in addition, is very actively developed, is an extracted project from boto: JMESPath. It has a very powerful syntax of doing things that would normally take pages of code to express.
Here are some examples:
search('foo | bar', {"foo": {"bar": "baz"}}) -> "baz"
search('foo[*].bar | [0]', {
"foo": [{"bar": ["first1", "second1"]},
{"bar": ["first2", "second2"]}]}) -> ["first1", "second1"]
search('foo | [0]', {"foo": [0, 1, 2]}) -> [0]