Finding a key recursively in a dictionary

Here is a way to do this using a "stack" and the "stack of iterators" pattern (credits to Gareth Rees):

def search(d, key, default=None):
    """Return a value corresponding to the specified key in the (possibly
    nested) dictionary d. If there is no item with that key, return
    default.
    """
    stack = [iter(d.items())]
    while stack:
        for k, v in stack[-1]:
            if isinstance(v, dict):
                stack.append(iter(v.items()))
                break
            elif k == key:
                return v
        else:
            stack.pop()
    return default

The print(search({"B": {"A": 2}}, "A")) would print 2.

Here's a function that searches a dictionary that contains both nested dictionaries and lists. It creates a list of the values of the results.

def get_recursively(search_dict, field):
    """
    Takes a dict with nested lists and dicts,
    and searches all dicts for a key of the field
    provided.
    """
    fields_found = []

    for key, value in search_dict.iteritems():

        if key == field:
            fields_found.append(value)

        elif isinstance(value, dict):
            results = get_recursively(value, field)
            for result in results:
                fields_found.append(result)

        elif isinstance(value, list):
            for item in value:
                if isinstance(item, dict):
                    more_results = get_recursively(item, field)
                    for another_result in more_results:
                        fields_found.append(another_result)

    return fields_found

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.