Evaluating algebraic expression of the keys of a dictionary on its values
Question:
I have a class A whose objects have a dictionary as a property. This dictionary is self.data. The keys of the dictionary are strings, while the values are float numbers.
I want to define a __getitem__(self,src:str) method that processes a string src as an algebraic expression of the keys in the dictionary self._data and returns the corresponding algebraic expression evaluated on the keys.
For example, if self.data = {'open':1, 'close':1}, I want self.__getitem__('open+close') to return 2. Also, self.__getitem__('(open+close)/2') should return 1.
My implementation is using the ast module and eval() in the following way.
import ast
class A():
def __init__(self, data=None):
self.data = {} if data is None else data
def __getitem__(self, src:str):
parsed_expr = ast.parse(src, mode='eval')
compiled_expr = compile(parsed_expr, '', 'eval')
item = eval(compiled_expr, self.data)
return item
obj = A({'open':1,'close':1})
print(obj['close + open']) # it prints 2
However, this definition of __getitem__ modifies the dictionary self.data by adding a __builtins__ key.
For example, print(obj.data) returns
{'close': 1, 'open': 1, '__builtins__': {'__name__': 'builtins', '__doc__': "Built-in functions, exceptions, and other objects.nnNoteworthy: None is the `nil' object; Ellipsis represents `...' in slices.", '__package__': '', '__loader__': <class '_frozen_importlib.BuiltinImporter'>, '__spec__': ModuleSpec(name='builtins', loader=<class '_frozen_importlib.BuiltinImporter'>, origin='built-in'), '__build_class__': <built-in function __build_class__>, '__import__': <built-in function __import__>, 'abs': <built-in function abs>, 'all': <built-in function all>, 'any': <built-in function any>, 'ascii': <built-in function ascii>, 'bin': <built-in function bin>, 'breakpoint': <built-in function breakpoint>, 'callable': <built-in function callable>, 'chr': <built-in function chr>, 'compile': <built-in function compile>, 'delattr': <built-in function delattr>, 'dir': <built-in function dir>, 'divmod': <built-in function divmod>, 'eval': <built-in function eval>, 'exec': <built-in function exec>, 'format': <built-in function format>, 'getattr': <built-in function getattr>, 'globals': <built-in function globals>, 'hasattr': <built-in function hasattr>, 'hash': <built-in function hash>, 'hex': <built-in function hex>, 'id': <built-in function id>, 'input': <built-in function input>, 'isinstance': <built-in function isinstance>, 'issubclass': <built-in function issubclass>, 'iter': <built-in function iter>, 'aiter': <built-in function aiter>, 'len': <built-in function len>, 'locals': <built-in function locals>, 'max': <built-in function max>, 'min': <built-in function min>, 'next': <built-in function next>, 'anext': <built-in function anext>, 'oct': <built-in function oct>, 'ord': <built-in function ord>, 'pow': <built-in function pow>, 'print': <built-in function print>, 'repr': <built-in function repr>, 'round': <built-in function round>, 'setattr': <built-in function setattr>, 'sorted': <built-in function sorted>, 'sum': <built-in function sum>, 'vars': <built-in function vars>, 'None': None, 'Ellipsis': Ellipsis, 'NotImplemented': NotImplemented, 'False': False, 'True': True, 'bool': <class 'bool'>, 'memoryview': <class 'memoryview'>, 'bytearray': <class 'bytearray'>, 'bytes': <class 'bytes'>, 'classmethod': <class 'classmethod'>, 'complex': <class 'complex'>, 'dict': <class 'dict'>, 'enumerate': <class 'enumerate'>, 'filter': <class 'filter'>, 'float': <class 'float'>, 'frozenset': <class 'frozenset'>, 'property': <class 'property'>, 'int': <class 'int'>, 'list': <class 'list'>, 'map': <class 'map'>, 'object': <class 'object'>, 'range': <class 'range'>, 'reversed': <class 'reversed'>, 'set': <class 'set'>, 'slice': <class 'slice'>, 'staticmethod': <class 'staticmethod'>, 'str': <class 'str'>, 'super': <class 'super'>, 'tuple': <class 'tuple'>, 'type': <class 'type'>, 'zip': <class 'zip'>, '__debug__': True, 'BaseException': <class 'BaseException'>, 'Exception': <class 'Exception'>, 'TypeError': <class 'TypeError'>, 'StopAsyncIteration': <class 'StopAsyncIteration'>, 'StopIteration': <class 'StopIteration'>, 'GeneratorExit': <class 'GeneratorExit'>, 'SystemExit': <class 'SystemExit'>, 'KeyboardInterrupt': <class 'KeyboardInterrupt'>, 'ImportError': <class 'ImportError'>, 'ModuleNotFoundError': <class 'ModuleNotFoundError'>, 'OSError': <class 'OSError'>, 'EnvironmentError': <class 'OSError'>, 'IOError': <class 'OSError'>, 'EOFError': <class 'EOFError'>, 'RuntimeError': <class 'RuntimeError'>, 'RecursionError': <class 'RecursionError'>, 'NotImplementedError': <class 'NotImplementedError'>, 'NameError': <class 'NameError'>, 'UnboundLocalError': <class 'UnboundLocalError'>, 'AttributeError': <class 'AttributeError'>, 'SyntaxError': <class 'SyntaxError'>, 'IndentationError': <class 'IndentationError'>, 'TabError': <class 'TabError'>, 'LookupError': <class 'LookupError'>, 'IndexError': <class 'IndexError'>, 'KeyError': <class 'KeyError'>, 'ValueError': <class 'ValueError'>, 'UnicodeError': <class 'UnicodeError'>, 'UnicodeEncodeError': <class 'UnicodeEncodeError'>, 'UnicodeDecodeError': <class 'UnicodeDecodeError'>, 'UnicodeTranslateError': <class 'UnicodeTranslateError'>, 'AssertionError': <class 'AssertionError'>, 'ArithmeticError': <class 'ArithmeticError'>, 'FloatingPointError': <class 'FloatingPointError'>, 'OverflowError': <class 'OverflowError'>, 'ZeroDivisionError': <class 'ZeroDivisionError'>, 'SystemError': <class 'SystemError'>, 'ReferenceError': <class 'ReferenceError'>, 'MemoryError': <class 'MemoryError'>, 'BufferError': <class 'BufferError'>, 'Warning': <class 'Warning'>, 'UserWarning': <class 'UserWarning'>, 'EncodingWarning': <class 'EncodingWarning'>, 'DeprecationWarning': <class 'DeprecationWarning'>, 'PendingDeprecationWarning': <class 'PendingDeprecationWarning'>, 'SyntaxWarning': <class 'SyntaxWarning'>, 'RuntimeWarning': <class 'RuntimeWarning'>, 'FutureWarning': <class 'FutureWarning'>, 'ImportWarning': <class 'ImportWarning'>, 'UnicodeWarning': <class 'UnicodeWarning'>, 'BytesWarning': <class 'BytesWarning'>, 'ResourceWarning': <class 'ResourceWarning'>, 'ConnectionError': <class 'ConnectionError'>, 'BlockingIOError': <class 'BlockingIOError'>, 'BrokenPipeError': <class 'BrokenPipeError'>, 'ChildProcessError': <class 'ChildProcessError'>, 'ConnectionAbortedError': <class 'ConnectionAbortedError'>, 'ConnectionRefusedError': <class 'ConnectionRefusedError'>, 'ConnectionResetError': <class 'ConnectionResetError'>, 'FileExistsError': <class 'FileExistsError'>, 'FileNotFoundError': <class 'FileNotFoundError'>, 'IsADirectoryError': <class 'IsADirectoryError'>, 'NotADirectoryError': <class 'NotADirectoryError'>, 'InterruptedError': <class 'InterruptedError'>, 'PermissionError': <class 'PermissionError'>, 'ProcessLookupError': <class 'ProcessLookupError'>, 'TimeoutError': <class 'TimeoutError'>, 'open': <built-in function open>, 'quit': Use quit() or Ctrl-D (i.e. EOF) to exit, 'exit': Use exit() or Ctrl-D (i.e. EOF) to exit, 'copyright': Copyright (c) 2001-2022 Python Software Foundation.
All Rights Reserved.
Copyright (c) 2000 BeOpen.com.
All Rights Reserved.
To overcome this problem, I can evaluate eval on a deep copy of self.data, but I don’t like this solution.
Do you have any thoughts about how to achieve the same result without affecting self.data?
Answers:
eval allows you to specify two dictionaries for name lookup: a globals dictionary and a locals dictionary. The documentation also notes (reformatted for readability):
- If the globals dictionary is present and does not contain a value for the key
__builtins__, a reference to the dictionary of the built-in module builtins is inserted under that key before expression is parsed. That way you can control what builtins are available to the executed code by inserting your own __builtins__ dictionary into globals before passing it to eval().
- If the locals dictionary is omitted it defaults to the globals dictionary.
- If both dictionaries are omitted, the expression is executed with the globals and locals in the environment where eval() is called.
So, a simple way of avoiding modifying self.data is to make it the locals dictionary rather than the globals dictionary:
item = eval(compiled_expr, {}, self.data)
However, you might want to take the suggestion in the documentation of creating an explicit __builtins__ dictionary in order to avoid giving access to arbitrary global names.
in my case, it works very well and does not affect the object data.
I have a class A whose objects have a dictionary as a property. This dictionary is self.data. The keys of the dictionary are strings, while the values are float numbers.
I want to define a __getitem__(self,src:str) method that processes a string src as an algebraic expression of the keys in the dictionary self._data and returns the corresponding algebraic expression evaluated on the keys.
For example, if self.data = {'open':1, 'close':1}, I want self.__getitem__('open+close') to return 2. Also, self.__getitem__('(open+close)/2') should return 1.
My implementation is using the ast module and eval() in the following way.
import ast
class A():
def __init__(self, data=None):
self.data = {} if data is None else data
def __getitem__(self, src:str):
parsed_expr = ast.parse(src, mode='eval')
compiled_expr = compile(parsed_expr, '', 'eval')
item = eval(compiled_expr, self.data)
return item
obj = A({'open':1,'close':1})
print(obj['close + open']) # it prints 2
However, this definition of __getitem__ modifies the dictionary self.data by adding a __builtins__ key.
For example, print(obj.data) returns
{'close': 1, 'open': 1, '__builtins__': {'__name__': 'builtins', '__doc__': "Built-in functions, exceptions, and other objects.nnNoteworthy: None is the `nil' object; Ellipsis represents `...' in slices.", '__package__': '', '__loader__': <class '_frozen_importlib.BuiltinImporter'>, '__spec__': ModuleSpec(name='builtins', loader=<class '_frozen_importlib.BuiltinImporter'>, origin='built-in'), '__build_class__': <built-in function __build_class__>, '__import__': <built-in function __import__>, 'abs': <built-in function abs>, 'all': <built-in function all>, 'any': <built-in function any>, 'ascii': <built-in function ascii>, 'bin': <built-in function bin>, 'breakpoint': <built-in function breakpoint>, 'callable': <built-in function callable>, 'chr': <built-in function chr>, 'compile': <built-in function compile>, 'delattr': <built-in function delattr>, 'dir': <built-in function dir>, 'divmod': <built-in function divmod>, 'eval': <built-in function eval>, 'exec': <built-in function exec>, 'format': <built-in function format>, 'getattr': <built-in function getattr>, 'globals': <built-in function globals>, 'hasattr': <built-in function hasattr>, 'hash': <built-in function hash>, 'hex': <built-in function hex>, 'id': <built-in function id>, 'input': <built-in function input>, 'isinstance': <built-in function isinstance>, 'issubclass': <built-in function issubclass>, 'iter': <built-in function iter>, 'aiter': <built-in function aiter>, 'len': <built-in function len>, 'locals': <built-in function locals>, 'max': <built-in function max>, 'min': <built-in function min>, 'next': <built-in function next>, 'anext': <built-in function anext>, 'oct': <built-in function oct>, 'ord': <built-in function ord>, 'pow': <built-in function pow>, 'print': <built-in function print>, 'repr': <built-in function repr>, 'round': <built-in function round>, 'setattr': <built-in function setattr>, 'sorted': <built-in function sorted>, 'sum': <built-in function sum>, 'vars': <built-in function vars>, 'None': None, 'Ellipsis': Ellipsis, 'NotImplemented': NotImplemented, 'False': False, 'True': True, 'bool': <class 'bool'>, 'memoryview': <class 'memoryview'>, 'bytearray': <class 'bytearray'>, 'bytes': <class 'bytes'>, 'classmethod': <class 'classmethod'>, 'complex': <class 'complex'>, 'dict': <class 'dict'>, 'enumerate': <class 'enumerate'>, 'filter': <class 'filter'>, 'float': <class 'float'>, 'frozenset': <class 'frozenset'>, 'property': <class 'property'>, 'int': <class 'int'>, 'list': <class 'list'>, 'map': <class 'map'>, 'object': <class 'object'>, 'range': <class 'range'>, 'reversed': <class 'reversed'>, 'set': <class 'set'>, 'slice': <class 'slice'>, 'staticmethod': <class 'staticmethod'>, 'str': <class 'str'>, 'super': <class 'super'>, 'tuple': <class 'tuple'>, 'type': <class 'type'>, 'zip': <class 'zip'>, '__debug__': True, 'BaseException': <class 'BaseException'>, 'Exception': <class 'Exception'>, 'TypeError': <class 'TypeError'>, 'StopAsyncIteration': <class 'StopAsyncIteration'>, 'StopIteration': <class 'StopIteration'>, 'GeneratorExit': <class 'GeneratorExit'>, 'SystemExit': <class 'SystemExit'>, 'KeyboardInterrupt': <class 'KeyboardInterrupt'>, 'ImportError': <class 'ImportError'>, 'ModuleNotFoundError': <class 'ModuleNotFoundError'>, 'OSError': <class 'OSError'>, 'EnvironmentError': <class 'OSError'>, 'IOError': <class 'OSError'>, 'EOFError': <class 'EOFError'>, 'RuntimeError': <class 'RuntimeError'>, 'RecursionError': <class 'RecursionError'>, 'NotImplementedError': <class 'NotImplementedError'>, 'NameError': <class 'NameError'>, 'UnboundLocalError': <class 'UnboundLocalError'>, 'AttributeError': <class 'AttributeError'>, 'SyntaxError': <class 'SyntaxError'>, 'IndentationError': <class 'IndentationError'>, 'TabError': <class 'TabError'>, 'LookupError': <class 'LookupError'>, 'IndexError': <class 'IndexError'>, 'KeyError': <class 'KeyError'>, 'ValueError': <class 'ValueError'>, 'UnicodeError': <class 'UnicodeError'>, 'UnicodeEncodeError': <class 'UnicodeEncodeError'>, 'UnicodeDecodeError': <class 'UnicodeDecodeError'>, 'UnicodeTranslateError': <class 'UnicodeTranslateError'>, 'AssertionError': <class 'AssertionError'>, 'ArithmeticError': <class 'ArithmeticError'>, 'FloatingPointError': <class 'FloatingPointError'>, 'OverflowError': <class 'OverflowError'>, 'ZeroDivisionError': <class 'ZeroDivisionError'>, 'SystemError': <class 'SystemError'>, 'ReferenceError': <class 'ReferenceError'>, 'MemoryError': <class 'MemoryError'>, 'BufferError': <class 'BufferError'>, 'Warning': <class 'Warning'>, 'UserWarning': <class 'UserWarning'>, 'EncodingWarning': <class 'EncodingWarning'>, 'DeprecationWarning': <class 'DeprecationWarning'>, 'PendingDeprecationWarning': <class 'PendingDeprecationWarning'>, 'SyntaxWarning': <class 'SyntaxWarning'>, 'RuntimeWarning': <class 'RuntimeWarning'>, 'FutureWarning': <class 'FutureWarning'>, 'ImportWarning': <class 'ImportWarning'>, 'UnicodeWarning': <class 'UnicodeWarning'>, 'BytesWarning': <class 'BytesWarning'>, 'ResourceWarning': <class 'ResourceWarning'>, 'ConnectionError': <class 'ConnectionError'>, 'BlockingIOError': <class 'BlockingIOError'>, 'BrokenPipeError': <class 'BrokenPipeError'>, 'ChildProcessError': <class 'ChildProcessError'>, 'ConnectionAbortedError': <class 'ConnectionAbortedError'>, 'ConnectionRefusedError': <class 'ConnectionRefusedError'>, 'ConnectionResetError': <class 'ConnectionResetError'>, 'FileExistsError': <class 'FileExistsError'>, 'FileNotFoundError': <class 'FileNotFoundError'>, 'IsADirectoryError': <class 'IsADirectoryError'>, 'NotADirectoryError': <class 'NotADirectoryError'>, 'InterruptedError': <class 'InterruptedError'>, 'PermissionError': <class 'PermissionError'>, 'ProcessLookupError': <class 'ProcessLookupError'>, 'TimeoutError': <class 'TimeoutError'>, 'open': <built-in function open>, 'quit': Use quit() or Ctrl-D (i.e. EOF) to exit, 'exit': Use exit() or Ctrl-D (i.e. EOF) to exit, 'copyright': Copyright (c) 2001-2022 Python Software Foundation.
All Rights Reserved.
Copyright (c) 2000 BeOpen.com.
All Rights Reserved.
To overcome this problem, I can evaluate eval on a deep copy of self.data, but I don’t like this solution.
Do you have any thoughts about how to achieve the same result without affecting self.data?
eval allows you to specify two dictionaries for name lookup: a globals dictionary and a locals dictionary. The documentation also notes (reformatted for readability):
- If the globals dictionary is present and does not contain a value for the key
__builtins__, a reference to the dictionary of the built-in modulebuiltinsis inserted under that key before expression is parsed. That way you can control what builtins are available to the executed code by inserting your own__builtins__dictionary into globals before passing it toeval().- If the locals dictionary is omitted it defaults to the globals dictionary.
- If both dictionaries are omitted, the expression is executed with the globals and locals in the environment where eval() is called.
So, a simple way of avoiding modifying self.data is to make it the locals dictionary rather than the globals dictionary:
item = eval(compiled_expr, {}, self.data)
However, you might want to take the suggestion in the documentation of creating an explicit __builtins__ dictionary in order to avoid giving access to arbitrary global names.
in my case, it works very well and does not affect the object data.