when you recurse, you need to return
the result of _finditem
def _finditem(obj, key):
if key in obj: return obj[key]
for k, v in obj.items():
if isinstance(v,dict):
return _finditem(v, key) #added return statement
To fix the actual algorithm, you need to realize that _finditem
returns None
if it didn’t find anything, so you need to check that explicitly to prevent an early return:
def _finditem(obj, key):
if key in obj: return obj[key]
for k, v in obj.items():
if isinstance(v,dict):
item = _finditem(v, key)
if item is not None:
return item
Of course, that will fail if you have None
values in any of your dictionaries. In that case, you could set up a sentinel object()
for this function and return that in the case that you don’t find anything — Then you can check against the sentinel
to know if you found something or not.