I could live with creating a new dict, sure (although it seems wasteful). I realize that something like this probably doesn't stand a chance of ever making it into the std library for what might be called "philosophical" reasons. I just want it for me (my personal philosophy runs more to the pragmatic -- well at least for coding).
I suppose the in-place version would be more along the lines of:
def updated(d, updates):
... d.update(updates) ... return d ...
[updated(d, {'c':3}) for d in [{'a':1, 'b':2}, {'x':10, 'y':'11'}]]
[{'a': 1, 'c': 3, 'b': 2}, {'y': '11', 'x': 10, 'c': 3}]
But I'd like to put the "updated" method on the "dict" object, which is what I can't seem to figure out. Yeah I know that's "bad", but to my mind so is polluting the global namespace with the "updated" function.
You could do something like:
py> class dict(dict): ... def updated(self, *args, **kwds): ... self.update(*args, **kwds) ... return self ... py> [d.updated(c=3) for d in [dict(a=1, b=2), dict(x=10, y=11)]] [{'a': 1, 'c': 3, 'b': 2}, {'y': 11, 'x': 10, 'c': 3}]
It'd mean you'd have to create all your dicts with the dict constructor instead of {} though.
Steve -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list