I have a dictionary that keeps track of two different types of values (let's say city
and village
) using two different types of keys (city_key
and village_key
). I'd like to annotate this dictionary with generics, so that when the dictionary receives key of type city_key
mypy/Pyright should annotate the return value as city
. Likewise, if you try to assign a city
value to a village_key
, mypy/pyright should throw an error.
The alternative is to maintain two different dictionaries, one for cities and one for villages, but I am curious if I can get away with one dictionary.
There is a question just like mine here, but it went unanswered.
Some pseudo code to show what I am aiming for in practice:
# two types of aliased keys
# ... edited to use NewType as per juanpa.arrivillaga comment
CityKey = NewType("CityKey", str)
VillageKey = NewType("VillageKey", str)
# two types of values, city and village
class City:...
class Village:...
# key generator that returns city or village key based on type of input
def generate_key(settlement: City | Village) -> CityKey | VillageKey: ...
# declare some keys & values
london = City("London")
london_key = generate_key(london)
mousehole = Village("Mousehole")
mousehole_key = generate_key(village)
# instantiate the dictionary
data: [????] = {}
# assign city to city key, and village to village key
data[london_key] = london
data[mousehole_key] = mousehole
# trying to assign village to city key should raise a type check error
data[london_key] = mousehole
# type of value accessed by village key should be village
reveal_type(data[mousehole_key]) # Type[Village]
You can use typing.overload
for this purpose, which can help us go from types like Callable[[A1 | B1], A2 | B2]
to one where it can be either Callable[[A1], A2]
or Callable[[B1], B2]
, and a subclass of dict
.
from typing import overload
@overload
def generate_key(settlement: City) -> CityKey:
# Just a stub
...
@overload
def generate_key(settlement: Village) -> VillageKey:
# Just a stub
...
def generate_key(settlement):
# Contains the actual implementation
[...]
class CityOrVillageDict(dict):
@overload
def __setitem__(self, key: CityKey, value: City) -> None:
# Just a stub
...
@overload
def __setitem__(self, key: VillageKey, value: Village) -> None:
# Just a stub
...
def __setitem__(self, key, value):
# Overloaded functions need an implementation
super().__setitem__(key, value)
@overload
def __getitem__(self, key: CityKey) -> City:
# Just a stub
...
@overload
def __getitem__(self, key: VillageKey) -> Village:
# Just a stub
...
def __getitem__(self, key):
# Overloaded functions need an implementation
return super().__getitem__(key)
data = CityOrVillageDict()