On 1/27/24 18:18, Donald Hunter wrote: > Jakub Kicinski <kuba@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: >> Is it possible to check at which "level" of the chainmap the key was >> found? If so we can also construct a 'chainmap of attr sets' and make >> sure that the key level == attr set level. I.e. that we got a hit at >> the first level which declares a key of that name. >> >> More crude option - we could construct a list of dicts (the levels >> within the chainmap) and keys they can't contain. Once we got a hit >> for a sub-message key at level A, all dicts currently on top of A >> are not allowed to add that key. Once we're done with the message we >> scan thru the list and make sure the keys haven't appeared? >> >> Another random thought, should we mark the keys which can "descend" >> somehow? IDK, put a ~ in front? >> >> selector: ~kind >> >> or some other char? > Okay, so I think the behaviour we need is to either search current scope > or search the outermost scope. My suggestion would be to replace the > ChainMap approach with just choosing between current and outermost > scope. The unusual case is needing to search the outermost scope so > using a prefix e.g. '/' for that would work. > > We can have 'selector: kind' continue to refer to current scope and then > have 'selector: /kind' refer to the outermost scope. > > If we run into a case that requires something other than current or > outermost then we could add e.g. '../kind' so that the scope to search > is always explicitly identified. Wouldn't add different chars in front of the selctor value be confusing? IMHO the solution of using a ChainMap with levels could be an easier solution. We could just modify the __getitem__() method to output both the value and the level, and the get() method to add the chance to specify a level (in our case the level found in the spec) and error out if the specified level doesn't match with the found one. Something like this: from collections import ChainMap class LevelChainMap(ChainMap): def __getitem__(self, key): for mapping in self.maps: try: return mapping[key], self.maps[::-1].index(mapping) except KeyError: pass return self.__missing__(key) def get(self, key, default=None, level=None): val, lvl = self[key] if key in self else (default, None) if level: if lvl != level: raise Exception("Level mismatch") return val, lvl # example usage c = LevelChainMap({'a':1}, {'inner':{'a':1}}, {'outer': {'inner':{'a':1}}}) print(c.get('a', level=2)) print(c.get('a', level=1)) #raise err This will leave the spec as it is and will require small changes. What do you think?