Slicing a Python OrderedDict

Question

In my code I frequently need to take a subset range of keys+values from a Python OrderedDict (from collections package). Slicing doesn't work (throws TypeError: unhashable type) and the alternative, iterating, is cumbersome:

from collections import OrderedDict

o = OrderedDict([('a', 1), ('b', 2), ('c', 3), ('d', 4)])

# want to do:
# x = o[1:3]
# need to do:
x = OrderedDict()
for idx, key in enumerate(o):
    if 1 <= idx < 3:
        x[key] = o[key]

Is there a better way to get this done?

Answer 1

The ordered dict in the standard library, doesn't provide that functionality. Even though libraries existed for a few years before collections.OrderedDict that have this functionality (and provide essentially a superset of OrderedDict): voidspace odict and ruamel.ordereddict (I am the author of the latter package, which is a reimplementation of odict in C):

from odict import OrderedDict as odict
p = odict([('a', 1), ('b', 2), ('c', 3), ('d', 4)])
print p[1:3]

In ruamel.ordereddict you can relax the ordered input requirement (AFAIK you cannot ask derivative of dict if its keys are ordered (would be good addition to ruamel.ordereddict to recognise collection.OrderedDicts)):

from ruamel.ordereddict import ordereddict

q = ordereddict(o, relax=True)
print q[1:3]
r = odict([('a', 1), ('b', 2), ('c', 3), ('d', 4)])
print r[1:3]

If you want (or have to) stay within the standard library you can sublass collections.OrderedDict's __getitem__:

class SlicableOrderedDict(OrderedDict):
    def __getitem__(self, k):
        if not isinstance(k, slice):
            return OrderedDict.__getitem__(self, k)
        x = SlicableOrderedDict()
        for idx, key in enumerate(self.keys()):
            if k.start <= idx < k.stop:
                x[key] = self[key]
        return x

s = SlicableOrderedDict([('a', 1), ('b', 2), ('c', 3), ('d', 4)])
print s[1:3]

of course you could use Martijn's or Jimmy's shorter versions to get the actual slice that needs returning:

from itertools import islice
class SlicableOrderedDict(OrderedDict):
    def __getitem__(self, k):
        if not isinstance(k, slice):
            return OrderedDict.__getitem__(self, k)
        return SlicableOrderedDict(islice(self.viewitems(), k.start, k.stop))

t = SlicableOrderedDict([('a', 1), ('b', 2), ('c', 3), ('d', 4)])
print t[1:3]

or if you just want smarten up all existing OrderedDicts without subclassing:

def get_item(self, k):
    if not isinstance(k, slice):
        return OrderedDict._old__getitem__(self, k)
    return OrderedDict(islice(self.viewitems(), k.start, k.stop))

OrderedDict._old__getitem__ = OrderedDict.__getitem__
OrderedDict.__getitem__ = get_item

u = OrderedDict([('a', 1), ('b', 2), ('c', 3), ('d', 4)])
print u[1:3]