Django that correctly handles nested dictionaries (original) (raw)

querystring-parser

This repository hosts the query string parser for Python/Django projects that correctly creates nested dictionaries from sent form/querystring data.

When to use it?

Lets say you have some textfields on your webpage that you wish to get as dictionary on the backend. The querystring could look like:

section[1]['words'][2]=a&section[0]['words'][2]=a&section[0]['words'][2]=b

Standard django REQUEST (QueryDict) variable will contain:

<QueryDict: {u"section[1]['words'][2]": [u'a'], u"section[0]['words'][2]": [u'a', u'b']}>

As you see it doesn't really convert it to dict. Instead of elegant dictionary you have a string called "section[1]['words'][2]" and "section[0]['words'][2]" and if you want to do something with it, you'll need to parse it (sic!).

When using querystring-parser the output will look like:

{u'section': {0: {u'words': {2: [u'a', u'b']}}, 1: {u'words': {2: u'a'}}}}

Tadam! Everything is much simpler and more beautiful now :)

Efficiency:

Test made using timeit show that in most cases speed of created library is similar to standard Django QueryDict parsing speed. For query string containing multidimensional complicated arrays querystring-parser is significantly slower. This is totally understandable as created library creates nested dictionaries in contrary to standard Django function which only tokenizes data. You can see results below. Edit: Actually parsing is done by urlparse.parse_qs so I've added it to tests.

Test string nr querystring-parser Django QueryDict parse_qs 0 2.75077319145 3.44334220886 0.582501888275 Test string nr querystring-parser Django QueryDict parse_qs 1 10.1889920235 10.2983090878 2.08930182457 Test string nr querystring-parser Django QueryDict parse_qs 2 0.613747119904 1.21649289131 0.283004999161 Test string nr querystring-parser Django QueryDict parse_qs 3 0.107316017151 0.459388017654 0.0687718391418 Test string nr querystring-parser Django QueryDict parse_qs 4 0.00291299819946 0.169251918793 0.0170118808746

Test #1 Is most interesting as is contains nested dictionaries in query string.

Installation:

Install using pip.

pip install querystring-parser

How to use:

Just add it to your Django project and start using it.

from querystring_parser import parser post_dict = parser.parse(request.POST.urlencode())

License:

MIT License