[Python-Dev] Proposal: add odict to collections (original) (raw)
Armin Ronacher armin.ronacher at active-4.com
Sun Jun 15 01:39:11 CEST 2008
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Hi,
I noticed lately that quite a few projects are implementing their own
subclasses of dict that retain the order of the key/value pairs.
However half of the implementations I came across are not implementing
the whole dict interface which leads to weird bugs, also the performance
of a Python implementation is not that great.
To fight that problem I want to proposed a new class in "collections" called odict which is a dict that keeps the items sorted, similar to a PHP array.
The interface would be fully compatible with dict and implemented as dict subclass. Updates to existing keys does not change the order of a key but new keys are inserted at the end.
Additionally it would support slicing where a list of key, value tuples is returned and sort/reverse/index methods that work like their list equivalents. Index based lookup could work via odict.byindex().
An implementation of that exists as part of the ordereddict implementation which however goes beyond that and is pretty much a fork of the python dict1.
Some reasons why ordered dicts are a useful feature:
in XML/HTML processing it's often desired to keep the attributes of an tag ordered during processing. So that input ordering is the same as the output ordering.
Form data transmitted via HTTP is usually ordered by the position of the input/textarea/select field in the HTML document. That information is currently lost in most Python web applications / frameworks.
Eaiser transition of code from Ruby/PHP which have sorted associative arrays / hashmaps.
Having an ordered dict in the standard library would allow other libraries support them. For example a PHP serializer could return odicts rather then dicts which drops the ordering information. XML libraries such as etree could add support for it when creating elements or return attribute dicts.
Regards, Armin
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