[Solved]-Reading multidimensional arrays from a POST request in Django

DrMeers’ link is no longer valid, so I’ll post another method of achieving the same thing. It’s also not perfect, and it would be much better if Django had such a function built-in. But, since it doesn’t:

Converting Multi-dimensional Form Arrays in Django

Disclaimer: I wrote that post. The essence of it is in this function, which could be more robust, but it works for arrays of one-level objects:

    def getDictArray(post, name):
        dic = {}
        for k in post.keys():
            if k.startswith(name):
                rest = k[len(name):]
                
                # split the string into different components
                parts = [p[:-1] for p in rest.split('[')][1:]
                print parts
                id = int(parts[0])
                
                # add a new dictionary if it doesn't exist yet
                if id not in dic:
                    dic[id] = {}
                    
                # add the information to the dictionary
                dic[id][parts[1]] = post.get(k)
        return dic

Does this help? http://dfcode.com/blog/2011/1/multi-dimensional-form-arrays-and-django/

If you want POST data, the only way to get it is to specify the exact ‘name’ you are looking for:

    person[1].name = request.POST['person[1][name]']
    person[1].age = request.POST['person[1][age]']
    person[2].name = request.POST['person[2][name]']
    person[2].age = request.POST['person[2][age]']

Here is a quick on-the-fly workaround in Python when you have the need to extract form values without explicitly typing the full name as a string:

    person_get = lambda *keys: request.POST[
        'person' + ''.join(['[%s]' % key for key in keys])]

Now when you need information, throw one of these suckers in and you’ll have much wider flexibility. Quick example:

    person[1].name = person_get('1', 'name')
    person[1].age = person_get('1', 'age')
    person[2].name = person_get('2', 'name')
    person[2].age = person_get('2', 'age')