Extracting values from a nested dictionary structure in python

Question

My code and data structure that results in the output below looks like this :

    Actions = set()

     # loop through and obtain a list of files and commands
    for item in d['server']:
         Actions.add('{action}'.format(**item))


     print(Actions)
     commands = list(Actions)

     commands = list(Actions)

Output:

     Actions = {"{'command1': ['uptime'], 'path': ['/var/log/syslog']}", "{'command1': ['df -h'], 'path': ['/var/log/auth.log']}"}

I need to extract the commands and paths separately and something like this doesn't work.

    print(commands[0]['command1'])

    Traceback (most recent call last):

File "read_shell_yaml.py", line 46, in print(commands[0]['command1']) TypeError: string indices must be integers

Answer 1

You are formatting your item dict into a string with the str.format method, which prevents the latter code from extracting items from the dict.

For your purpose, a more fitting data structure for Actions would be a dict indexed by the command instead:

Actions = {}
for item in d['server']:
    Actions[items.pop('command1')] = item

so that you can later iterate through the items of the Actions dict like this:

for command, properties in Actions.items():
    print(command, properties['path'])

Answer 2

If you need to do it in the way that you did, you can at the end:

import json
content = json.loads(command[0].replace("'", '"'))
content['command1'] #prints ['df -h']