Elegant Solution for looping over a json hash with a fickle structure

Question

I have a json hash which has a lot of keys. I retrieve this hash from a web service at regular intervals and for different parameters etc. This has more or less fixed structure, in the sense that keys are sometimes missing. So I end up with a lot of code of the following nature

Edit: Sample data

data =
{
id1 : {dict...},
id2 : {dict..},
'' : {value...},
...
}

for item in data:
   id = data.get("id")
   if not id:
      continue
   ...

I want to skip the 3rd element and move on. The structure data is a nested dict and I loop inside each of these nests. There are keys missing there as well :(

I was wondering if there was a more elegant solution than having 50 different ifs and continues

Thanks

Answer 1

How about iterating over the dict keys and doing your processing:

data = {
'id1' : {'a':"", 'b':""},
'id2' : {'c':"", 'd':""},
'' : {'c':"", 'd':""},
"": {'c':"", 'd':""},
}

for key in data.iterkeys():
    if key:
        print key
        print "Processing %s" % key
        # do further processing of data[key]

This outputs the following. Notice that it skips processing for which key is missing.

id2
Processing id2
id1
Processing id1