Hi Ben, When I said "deep", I meant, as in, to an arbitrary level of nesting (i.e. dicts, containing dicts, containing dicts etc) - sorry if I got the terminology wrong.
The two dicts weren't equal by intention - the idea was that a comparison operator would return "False" for those two. I was just curious why cmp() was phased out (as in, were there cases where "==" was better) - but if functionality they're the same, and it's just a nomenclature thing, that's also fine =). Finally, so cmp()/== return true/false for comparison - just noticed this which actually prints out diff-style comparisons: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/datadiff Cheers, Victor On Friday, 20 March 2015 13:33:52 UTC+11, Ben Finney wrote: > Victor Hooi <victorh...@gmail.com> writes: > > > What is the currently most Pythonic way for doing deep comparisons > > between dicts? > > What distinction do you intend by saying "deep comparison"? As > contrasted with what? > > > For example, say you have the following two dictionaries > > > > a = { > > 'bob': { 'full_name': 'bob jones', 'age': 4, 'hobbies': ['hockey', > > 'tennis'], 'parents': { 'mother': 'mary', 'father', 'mike'}}, > > 'james': { 'full_name': 'james joyce', 'age': 6, 'hobbies': [],} > > } > > > > b = { > > 'bob': { 'full_name': 'bob jones', 'age': 4, 'hobbies': ['hockey', > > 'tennis']}, > > 'james': { 'full_name': 'james joyce', 'age': 5, 'hobbies': []} > > } > > Those two dicts are not equal. How would your intended "deep comparison" > behave for those two values? > > > However, this page seems to imply that cmp() is deprecated? > > https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.0.html#ordering-comparisons > > It is, yes. > > > Should we just be using the equality operator ("==") instead then? E.g.: > > > > a == b > > Yes. That is a comparison that would return False for comparing the > above two values. Would you expect different behaviour? > > > What is the reason for this? > > I don't really understand. 'cmp' is deprecated, and you can compare two > dicts with the built-in operators. That's the reason; are you expecting > some other reason? > > > Or is there a better way to do this? > > I don't really know what it is you want to do. What behaviour different > from the built-in comparison operators do you want? > > -- > \ "I went over to the neighbor's and asked to borrow a cup of | > `\ salt. 'What are you making?' 'A salt lick.'" --Steven Wright | > _o__) | > Ben Finney -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
