PHP's form bracket trick is to Django's ___?

In PHP you can create form elements with names like:

category[1]
category[2]

or even

category[junk]
category[test]

When the form is posted, category is automatically turned into a nice dictionary like:

category[1] => "the input value", category[2] => "the other input value"

Is there a way to do that in Django? request.POST.getlist isn't quite right, because it simply returns a list, n开发者_如何学Cot a dictionary. I need the keys too.

---

You could use django.utils.datastructures.DotExpandedDict with inputs named category.1, category.2 etc. to do something similar, but I don't really see why you would if you ever have to validate and redisplay the information you're receiving, when using a django.forms.Form will do everything for you - appropriate fields will call the getlist method for you and the prefix argument can be used to reuse the same form multiple times.

---

Hardly pretty, but it should get the job done:

import re

def getdict(d, pref):
  r = re.compile(r'^%s\[(.*)\]$' % pref)
  return dict((r.sub(r'\1', k), v) for (k, v) in d.iteritems() if r.match(k))

D = {
  'foo[bar]': '123',
  'foo[baz]': '456',
  'quux': '789',
}

print getdict(D, 'foo')
# Returns: {'bar': '123', 'baz': '456'}

---

You can do request.POST['namefromform'] - I take it this isn't what you're looking for?

---

Use request.POST.keys()

---

Sorry, as far as I've found, getlist is all there is for what you want, but you could easily parse the request using request.POST.keys() and turn them into dictionaries.

---

I'm not a python expert but you might try

for key,value in request.POST.iteritems() 
  doSomething....

---

django.utils.datastrctures has DotExpandedDict

I have written fork of it, that parses dictionary by brackets..

class BrExpandedDict(dict):
    """
    A special dictionary constructor that takes a dictionary in which the keys
    may contain brackets to specify inner dictionaries. It's confusing, but this
    example should make sense.

    >>> d = BrExpandedDict({'person[1][firstname]': ['Simon'], \
            'person[1][lastname]': ['Willison'], \
            'person[2][firstname]': ['Adrian'], \
            'person[2][lastname]': ['Holovaty']})
    >>> d
    {'person': {'1': {'lastname': ['Willison'], 'firstname': ['Simon']}, '2': {'lastname': ['Holovaty'], 'firstname': ['Adrian']}}}
    >>> d['person']
    {'1': {'lastname': ['Willison'], 'firstname': ['Simon']}, '2': {'lastname': ['Holovaty'], 'firstname': ['Adrian']}}
    >>> d['person']['1']
    {'lastname': ['Willison'], 'firstname': ['Simon']}

    """
    def __init__(self, key_to_list_mapping):
        for k, v in key_to_list_mapping.items():
            current = self
            k = k.replace(']', '')
            bits = k.split('[')
            for bit in bits[:-1]:
                current = current.setdefault(bit, {})
            # Now assign value to current position
            try:
                current[bits[-1]] = v
            except TypeError: # Special-case if current isn't a dict.
                current = {bits[-1]: v}

if __name__ == "__main__":
    import doctest
    doctest.testmod()