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

Question

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, not a dictionary. I need the keys too.

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

Use request.POST.keys()

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

I'm not a python expert but you might try

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

Answer 5

Check my answer from here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1482362/django-can-a-view-receive-a-list-as-parameter/1482365#1482365

Answer 6

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'}

Answer 7

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.