chunk is a fork of David Schoonover's Bunch package, providing similar functionality. 99% of the work was done by him, and the fork was made mainly for lack of responsiveness for fixes and maintenance on the original code.

Chunk is a dictionary that supports attribute-style access, a la JavaScript.

>>> b = Chunk()
>>> b.hello = 'world'
>>> b.hello
'world'
>>> b['hello'] += "!"
>>> b.hello
'world!'
>>> b.foo = Chunk(lol=True)
>>> b.foo.lol
True
>>> b.foo is b['foo']
True

A Chunk is a subclass of dict; it supports all the methods a dict does:

>>> b.keys()
['foo', 'hello']

Including update():

>>> b.update({ 'ponies': 'are pretty!' }, hello=42)
>>> print repr(b)
Chunk(foo=Chunk(lol=True), hello=42, ponies='are pretty!')

As well as iteration:

>>> [ (k,b[k]) for k in b ]
[('ponies', 'are pretty!'), ('foo', Chunk(lol=True)), ('hello', 42)]

And "splats":

>>> "The {knights} who say {ni}!".format(**Chunk(knights='lolcats', ni='can haz'))
'The lolcats who say can haz!'

Chunkes happily and transparently serialize to JSON and YAML.

>>> b = Chunk(foo=Chunk(lol=True), hello=42, ponies='are pretty!')
>>> import json
>>> json.dumps(b)
'{"ponies": "are pretty!", "foo": {"lol": true}, "hello": 42}'

If JSON support is present (json or simplejson), Chunk will have a toJSON() method which returns the object as a JSON string.

If you have PyYAML installed, Chunk attempts to register itself with the various YAML Representers so that Chunkes can be transparently dumped and loaded.

>>> b = Chunk(foo=Chunk(lol=True), hello=42, ponies='are pretty!')
>>> import yaml
>>> yaml.dump(b)
'!chunk.Chunk\nfoo: !chunk.Chunk {lol: true}\nhello: 42\nponies: are pretty!\n'
>>> yaml.safe_dump(b)
'foo: {lol: true}\nhello: 42\nponies: are pretty!\n'

In addition, Chunk instances will have a toYAML() method that returns the YAML string using yaml.safe_dump(). This method also replaces __str__ if present, as I find it far more readable. You can revert back to Python's default use of __repr__ with a simple assignment: Chunk.__str__ = Chunk.__repr__. The Chunk class will also have a static method Chunk.fromYAML(), which loads a Chunk out of a YAML string.

Finally, Chunk converts easily and recursively to (unchunkify(), Chunk.toDict()) and from (chunkify(), Chunk.fromDict()) a normal dict, making it easy to cleanly serialize them in other formats.

• It is safe to import * from this module. You'll get: Chunk, chunkify, and unchunkify.
• Ample Tests. Just run make test from the project root.

Open a ticket / fork the project on GitHub.