[Python-Dev] Proposal: add odict to collections (original) (raw)

André Malo nd at perlig.de
Sun Jun 15 01:57:23 CEST 2008

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.

I find this collection of cases pretty weak as an argument for implementing that in the stdlib. A lot of special purpose types would fit into such reasoning, but do you want to have all of them maintained here?

nd

Da fällt mir ein, wieso gibt es eigentlich in Unicode kein "i" mit einem Herzchen als Tüpfelchen? Das wär sooo süüss!

                             -- Björn Höhrmann in darw

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