How to find the shape or dimension of an array of dictionaries (or dictionary of dictionaries) in Python

Question

say i have an array of dictionaries:

thisdict={}
thisdict[0]={1: 'one', 2: "two"}
thisdict[1]={3: 'three', 4:'four'}
thisdict[2]={5: 'five', 6:'six'}

How can I find its dimesion? I'm looking for (3,2) -- 3 dictionaries, each with 2 entries.

len(thisdict) yields 3.

np.shape(thisdict) returns ()

and

np.size(thisdict) returns 1.

If I convert the dictionary to a dataframe via

import pandas as pd
tmp = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(thisdict)

then,

np.size(tmp) = 18

and

np.shape(tmp) =(6,3)

since tmp =

which still does't give me what I'm looking for.

I guess I could do

len(thisdict) followed by

len(thisdict[0])

to get the two dimensions I'm interested in, but I assume there is a better way. What is the "correct" way of getting these two dimensions?

Answer 1

There is nothing wrong with len(thisdict) and len(thisdict[0]), provided that the 0-key will always exist and all sub-dictionaries have the same length. If not, you could use something along the lines of

def dict_dims(mydict):
    d1 = len(mydict)
    d2 = 0
    for d in mydict:
        d2 = max(d2, len(d))
    return d1, d2