Destructuring dicts and objects in Python

Question

In Javascript, I can use destructuring to extract properties I want from a javascript objects in one liner. For example:

currentUser = {   "id": 24,   "name": "John Doe",   "website": "http://mywebsite.com",   "description": "I am an actor",   "email": "[email protected]",   "gender": "M",   "phone_number": "+12345678",   "username": "johndoe",   "birth_date": "1991-02-23",   "followers": 46263,   "following": 345,   "like": 204,   "comments": 9 }  let { id, username } = this.currentUser; console.log(id) // 24 console.log(username) //johndoe 

Do we have something similar in Python for Python dicts and Python objects? Example of Python way of doing for python objects:

class User:     def __init__(self, id, name, website, description, email, gender, phone_number, username):         self.id = id         self.name = name         self.website = website         self.description = description         self.email = email         self.gender = gender         self.phone_number = phone_number         self.username = username    current_user = User(24, "Jon Doe", "http://mywebsite.com", "I am an actor", "[email protected]", "M", "+12345678", "johndoe")      # This is a pain id = current_user.id email = current_user.email gender = current_user.gender username = current_user.username      print(id, email, gender, username) 

Writing those 4 lines (as mentioned in example above) vs writing a single line (as mentioned below) to fetch values I need from an object is a real pain point.

(id, email, gender, username) = current_user 

Answer 1

You can use operator module from standard library as follows:

from operator import attrgetter id, email, gender, username = attrgetter('id', 'email', 'gender', 'username')(current_user) print(id, email, gender, username) 

In case you have a dict like from your example

currentUser = {   "id": 24,   "name": "John Doe",   "website": "http://mywebsite.com",   "description": "I am an actor",   "email": "[email protected]",   "gender": "M",   "phone_number": "+12345678",   "username": "johndoe",   "birth_date": "1991-02-23",   "followers": 46263,   "following": 345,   "like": 204,   "comments": 9 } 

just use itemgetter instead of attrgetter:

from operator import itemgetter id, email, gender, username = itemgetter('id', 'email', 'gender', 'username')(currentUser) print(id, email, gender, username) 

Answer 2

Building off of other answers, I would recommend also using Python's dataclasses and use __getitem__ to get specific fields:

from dataclasses import astuple, dataclass  @dataclass class User:     id: int     name: str     website: str     description: str     email: str     gender: str     phone_number: str     username: str          def __iter__(self):         return iter(astuple(self))          def __getitem__(self, keys):         return iter(getattr(self, k) for k in keys)           current_user = User(id=24, name="Jon Doe", website="http://mywebsite.com", description="I am an actor", email="[email protected]", gender="M", phone_number="+12345678", username="johndoe")  # Access fields sequentially: id, _, email, *_ = current_user # Access fields out of order: id, email, gender, username = current_user["id", "email", "gender", "username"]