Question 189969 in Json Question posted in
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Json – Accessing the first key in a nested Dictionary

I have a dictionary that looks like the following:

{
"DICT_KEY1": {"nestKey1": "val", "nestKey2": "val", "nestKey3": "val"}
}

If I have a function that takes in a parameter like the dictionary above,
How would I access the key "DICT_KEY1" (not the values) without mentioning "DICT_KEY1" (since the nested dictionary passed into the parameter would be different each time)?

I can only think of accessing DICT_KEY1 by mentioning the key name, like:

dict1 = {(nested dictionary param)}
print(dict1['DICT_KEY1'])
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2

Answers


  1. 0

    You can use list(dict.keys()) to access the keys as a list.

    For instance:

    d = {"DICT_KEY1": {"nestKey1": "val", "nestKey2": "val", "nestKey3": "val"}}
print(list(d.keys()[0])

    This is fine for small dictionaries, but can be inefficient for large ones. If you have a bigger dictionary, using a library might be more appropriate. See this post for more guidance with third party libraries.

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  2. 0

    The most efficient way to achieve that is using next() + iter() being the time complexity of this O(1).

    print(next(iter(dict1)))

    Transforming the keys of the dictionary into a list and accessing the first element will take O(n), what make that inneficient for bigger dictionaries.

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