Separate text from nested OrderedDict in Python

Question

Here is my OrderedDict object ,

a=OrderedDict([(u'p', [u'"The Exam Room" is a new series in which everyday medical questions are answered by physicians and professors from the Yale School of Medicine.', u'In our second episode: Dr. Stephen Strittmatter, Vincent Coates Professor of Neurology and director of the Adler Memory Clinic in Neurology, explains when memory loss can become a problem and what you can do to boost your brain power.', OrderedDict([(u'em', u'Produced & Hosted by Noah Golden')])])])

What i am trying to do is to get text from this object as ,

>>> a.get('p')

And getting output as ,

[u'"The Exam Room" is a new series in which everyday medical questions are answered by physicians and professors from the Yale School of Medicine.', u'In our second episode: Dr. Stephen Strittmatter, Vincent Coates Professor of Neurology and director of the Adler Memory Clinic in Neurology, explains when memory loss can become a problem and what you can do to boost your brain power.', OrderedDict([(u'em', u'Produced & Hosted by Noah Golden')])]

But resultant text also containing one OrderedDict.

How can i combine text from both the OrderedDict ,

Expected Output:

The Exam Room" is a new series in which everyday medical questions are answered by physicians and professors from the Yale School of Medicine.', u'In our second episode: Dr. Stephen Strittmatter, Vincent Coates Professor of Neurology and director of the Adler Memory Clinic in Neurology, explains when memory loss can become a problem and what you can do to boost your brain power. Produced & Hosted by Noah Golden

Answer 1

The key here would be recursion, if you do not know the nesting of the types in advance. Here is an example (formatted the text for readability):

#!/usr/bin/env python

import collections

a = collections.OrderedDict([(u'p', [u""" 
    "The Exam Room" is a new series in
    which everyday medical questions are answered by physicians and 
    professors from the Yale School of Medicine.""", 
    u"""In our second episode: Dr. Stephen Strittmatter,
    Vincent Coates Professor of Neurology and director of
    the Adler Memory Clinic in Neurology, explains when 
    memory loss can become a problem and what you can do to 
    boost your brain power.""", 
    collections.OrderedDict([(u'em',
        u'Produced & Hosted by Noah Golden')])])])

Now flatten the object, which might be a mapping or a list. Three options are implemented: if the value found is a string, we just append it to our collector. If it is a list or a Mapping, we call flatten again. Note that the you can specify some allowed tags with the allowed kwarg:

def flatten(obj, allowed=(u'p', u'em')):
    collector = []

    def process(v, collector=collector):
        if isinstance(v, (list, collections.Mapping)):
            collector += flatten(v, allowed=allowed)
        elif isinstance(v, basestring):
            collector.append(v)
        else:
            raise ValueError('Cannot handle type: {t}'.format(t=v.__class__))

    if isinstance(obj, list):
        for v in obj:
            process(v)

    if isinstance(obj, collections.Mapping):
        for k, v in obj.iteritems():
            if k in allowed:
                process(v)

    return collector

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print(flatten(a))

The result with your example would be a three element list, which looks something like this:

[u'"The Exam Room" is a new series ...',
 u'In our second episode: ...',
 u'Produced & Hosted by Noah Golden']

Now if you want a single string, just join the now flattened list:

print(''.join(flatten(a)))

Answer 2

This is a strange dict, but you can achieve want you want like this:

[a['p'][0],a['p'][1] + u' ' + a['p'][2]['em']]

Result:

[u'"The Exam Room" is a new series in which everyday medical questions are answered by physicians and professors from the Yale School of Medicine.', u'In our second episode: Dr. Stephen Strittmatter, Vincent Coates Professor of Neurology and director of the Adler Memory Clinic in Neurology, explains when memory loss can become a problem and what you can do to boost your brain power. Produced & Hosted by Noah Golden']

This will return a list, as you asked for in your question. If you want to have a single string instead:

import string
string.join([a['p'][0],a['p'][1],a['p'][2]['em']])

which will result in:

"The Exam Room" is a new series in which everyday medical questions are answered by physicians and professors from the Yale School of Medicine. In our second episode: Dr. Stephen Strittmatter, Vincent Coates Professor of Neurology and director of the Adler Memory Clinic in Neurology, explains when memory loss can become a problem and what you can do to boost your brain power. Produced & Hosted by Noah Golden