Very frequently when I'm programming in python, I write functions that return a dictionary with string keys.

When developing or debugging such programs in IPython, it's pretty tedious to inspect these dictionaries. First, you need to get a list of keys. Then, to see a particular value in the dictionary d, you need to type out d['key']. It gets tedious after a while.

IPython has really useful object introspection and tab-completion features, but they aren't useful in this situation. A simple hack is to implement a class which sets the instance attributes using the key/value pairs stored in a dictionary.

class DictWrap(object):
    """
    Class to wrap a python dictionary.
    This helps with tab completion for object introspection in IPython

        myD = {'one' : 1, 'two' : 2}
        d = DictWrap(myD)

    Now in IPython you can inspect and autocomplete with d.o<TAB>
    """

    def __init__(self, d):
        """
        Construct a DictWrap instance from a python dictionary d
        """
        for k,v in d.iteritems():
            setattr(self, k, v)

Now in the IPython shell, you can easily inspect your dictionaries using tab-completion!

myD = {'one' : 1, 'two' : 2, 'three' : 3}
d = DictWrap(myD)
d.<TAB> # prints d.one d.two d.three
d.t<TAB> # prints d.two d.three