Say you want to access the values if your dictionary via the dot notation instead of the dictionary syntax. That is, you have:
d = {'name':'Joe', 'mood':'grumpy'}
And you want to get at "name" and "mood" via
d.name
d.mood
instead of the usual
d['name']
d['mood']
Why would you want to do this? Maybe you're fond of the Javascript Way. Or you find it more aesthetic. In my case I need to have the same piece of code deal with items that are either instances of Django models or plain dictionaries, so I need to provide a uniform way of getting at the attributes.
Turns out it's pretty simple:
class DictObj(object):
def __init__(self, d):
self.d = d
def __getattr__(self, m):
return self.d.get(m, None)
d = DictObj(d)
d.name
# prints Joe
d.mood
# prints grumpy