Override the {...} notation so i get an OrderedDict() instead of a dict()?

Question

Update: dicts retaining insertion order is guaranteed for Python 3.7+

I want to use a .py file like a config file. So using the {...} notation I can create a dictionary using strings as keys but the definition order is lost in a standard python dictionary.

My question: is it possible to override the {...} notation so that I get an OrderedDict() instead of a dict()?

I was hoping that simply overriding dict constructor with OrderedDict (dict = OrderedDict) would work, but it doesn't.

Eg:

dict = OrderedDict
dictname = {
   'B key': 'value1',
   'A key': 'value2',
   'C key': 'value3'
   }

print dictname.items()

Output:

[('B key', 'value1'), ('A key', 'value2'), ('C key', 'value3')]

Answer 1

Here's a hack that almost gives you the syntax you want:

class _OrderedDictMaker(object):
    def __getitem__(self, keys):
        if not isinstance(keys, tuple):
            keys = (keys,)
        assert all(isinstance(key, slice) for key in keys)

        return OrderedDict([(k.start, k.stop) for k in keys])

ordereddict = _OrderedDictMaker()

from nastyhacks import ordereddict

menu = ordereddict[
   "about" : "about",
   "login" : "login",
   'signup': "signup"
]

Edit: Someone else discovered this independently, and has published the odictliteral package on PyPI that provides a slightly more thorough implementation - use that package instead

Answer 2

To literally get what you are asking for, you have to fiddle with the syntax tree of your file. I don't think it is advisable to do so, but I couldn't resist the temptation to try. So here we go.

First, we create a module with a function my_execfile() that works like the built-in execfile(), except that all occurrences of dictionary displays, e.g. {3: 4, "a": 2} are replaced by explicit calls to the dict() constructor, e.g. dict([(3, 4), ('a', 2)]). (Of course we could directly replace them by calls to collections.OrderedDict(), but we don't want to be too intrusive.) Here's the code:

import ast

class DictDisplayTransformer(ast.NodeTransformer):
    def visit_Dict(self, node):
        self.generic_visit(node)
        list_node = ast.List(
            [ast.copy_location(ast.Tuple(list(x), ast.Load()), x[0])
             for x in zip(node.keys, node.values)],
            ast.Load())
        name_node = ast.Name("dict", ast.Load())
        new_node = ast.Call(ast.copy_location(name_node, node),
                            [ast.copy_location(list_node, node)],
                            [], None, None)
        return ast.copy_location(new_node, node)

def my_execfile(filename, globals=None, locals=None):
    if globals is None:
        globals = {}
    if locals is None:
        locals = globals
    node = ast.parse(open(filename).read())
    transformed = DictDisplayTransformer().visit(node)
    exec compile(transformed, filename, "exec") in globals, locals

With this modification in place, we can modify the behaviour of dictionary displays by overwriting dict. Here is an example:

# test.py
from collections import OrderedDict
print {3: 4, "a": 2}
dict = OrderedDict
print {3: 4, "a": 2}

Now we can run this file using my_execfile("test.py"), yielding the output

{'a': 2, 3: 4}
OrderedDict([(3, 4), ('a', 2)])

Note that for simplicity, the above code doesn't touch dictionary comprehensions, which should be transformed to generator expressions passed to the dict() constructor. You'd need to add a visit_DictComp() method to the DictDisplayTransformer class. Given the above example code, this should be straight-forward.

Again, I don't recommend this kind of messing around with the language semantics. Did you have a look into the ConfigParser module?

Answer 3

OrderedDict is not "standard python syntax", however, an ordered set of key-value pairs (in standard python syntax) is simply:

[('key1 name', 'value1'), ('key2 name', 'value2'), ('key3 name', 'value3')]

To explicitly get an OrderedDict:

OrderedDict([('key1 name', 'value1'), ('key2 name', 'value2'), ('key3 name', 'value3')])

Another alternative, is to sort dictname.items(), if that's all you need:

sorted(dictname.items())

Answer 4

As of python 3.6, all dictionaries will be ordered by default.

Insertion order is always preserved in the new dict implementation:

>>>x = {'a': 1, 'b':2, 'c':3 }
>>>list(x.keys())
['a', 'b', 'c']

As of python 3.6 **kwargs order [PEP468] and class attribute order [PEP520] are preserved. The new compact, ordered dictionary implementation is used to implement the ordering for both of these.

Answer 5

The one solution I found is to patch python itself, making the dict object remember the order of insertion.

This then works for all kind of syntaxes:

x = {'a': 1, 'b':2, 'c':3 }
y = dict(a=1, b=2, c=3)

etc.

I have taken the ordereddict C implementation from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ruamel.ordereddict/ and merged back into the main python code.

If you do not mind re-building the python interpreter, here is a patch for Python 2.7.8: https://github.com/fwyzard/cpython/compare/2.7.8...ordereddict-2.7.8.diff .A

Answer 6

What you are asking for is impossible, but if a config file in JSON syntax is sufficient you can do something similar with the json module:

>>> import json, collections
>>> d = json.JSONDecoder(object_pairs_hook = collections.OrderedDict)
>>> d.decode('{"a":5,"b":6}')
OrderedDict([(u'a', 5), (u'b', 6)])

Answer 7

If what you are looking for is a way to get easy-to-use initialization syntax - consider creating a subclass of OrderedDict and adding operators to it that update the dict, for example:

from collections import OrderedDict

class OrderedMap(OrderedDict):
    def __add__(self,other):
        self.update(other)
        return self

d = OrderedMap()+{1:2}+{4:3}+{"key":"value"}

d will be- OrderedMap([(1, 2), (4, 3), ('key','value')])

---

Another possible syntactic-sugar example using the slicing syntax:

class OrderedMap(OrderedDict):
    def __getitem__(self, index):
        if isinstance(index, slice):
            self[index.start] = index.stop 
            return self
        else:
            return OrderedDict.__getitem__(self, index)

d = OrderedMap()[1:2][6:4][4:7]["a":"H"]