How to completely traverse a complex dictionary of unknown depth?

Instead of writing your own parser, depending on the task, you could extend encoders and decoders from the standard library json module.

I recommend this especially if you need to encode objects belonging to custom classes into the json. If you have to do some operation which could be done also on a string representation of the json, consider also iterating JSONEncoder().iterencode

For both the reference is http://docs.python.org/2/library/json.html#encoders-and-decoders

If you only need to walk the dictionary, I'd suggest using a recursive walk function that takes a dictionary and then recursively walks through its elements. Something like this:

def walk(node):
    for key, item in node.items():
        if item is a collection:
            walk(item)
        else:
            It is a leaf, do your thing

If you also want to search for elements, or query several elements that pass certain criteria, have a look at the jsonpath module.

If you know the meaning of the data, you might want to create a parse function to turn the nested containers into a tree of objects of custom types. You'd then use methods of those custom objects to do whatever you need to do with the data.

For your example data structure, you might create Program, VariableDeclaration, VariableDeclarator, Identifier, Literal and BinaryExpression classes, then use something like this for your parser:

def parse(d):
    t = d[u"type"]

    if t == u"Program":
        body = [parse(block) for block in d[u"body"]]
        return Program(body)

    else if t == u"VariableDeclaration":
        kind = d[u"kind"]
        declarations = [parse(declaration) for declaration in d[u"declarations"]]
        return VariableDeclaration(kind, declarations)

    else if t == u"VariableDeclarator":
        id = parse(d[u"id"])
        init = parse(d[u"init"])
        return VariableDeclarator(id, init)

    else if t == u"Identifier":
        return Identifier(d[u"name"])

    else if t == u"Literal":
        return Literal(d[u"value"])

    else if t == u"BinaryExpression":
        operator = d[u"operator"]
        left = parse(d[u"left"])
        right = parse(d[u"right"])
        return BinaryExpression(operator, left, right)

    else:
        raise ValueError("Invalid data structure.")

You can use a recursive generator for converting your dictionary to flat lists.

def dict_generator(indict, pre=None):
    pre = pre[:] if pre else []
    if isinstance(indict, dict):
        for key, value in indict.items():
            if isinstance(value, dict):
                for d in dict_generator(value, pre + [key]):
                    yield d
            elif isinstance(value, list) or isinstance(value, tuple):
                for v in value:
                    for d in dict_generator(v, pre + [key]):
                        yield d
            else:
                yield pre + [key, value]
    else:
        yield pre + [indict]

It returns

[u'body', u'kind', u'var']
[u'init', u'declarations', u'body', u'type', u'Literal']
[u'init', u'declarations', u'body', u'value', 2]
[u'declarations', u'body', u'type', u'VariableDeclarator']
[u'id', u'declarations', u'body', u'type', u'Identifier']
[u'id', u'declarations', u'body', u'name', u'i']
[u'body', u'type', u'VariableDeclaration']
[u'body', u'kind', u'var']
[u'init', u'declarations', u'body', u'type', u'Literal']
[u'init', u'declarations', u'body', u'value', 4]
[u'declarations', u'body', u'type', u'VariableDeclarator']
[u'id', u'declarations', u'body', u'type', u'Identifier']
[u'id', u'declarations', u'body', u'name', u'j']
[u'body', u'type', u'VariableDeclaration']
[u'body', u'kind', u'var']
[u'init', u'declarations', u'body', u'operator', u'*']
[u'right', u'init', u'declarations', u'body', u'type', u'Identifier']
[u'right', u'init', u'declarations', u'body', u'name', u'j']
[u'init', u'declarations', u'body', u'type', u'BinaryExpression']
[u'left', u'init', u'declarations', u'body', u'type', u'Identifier']
[u'left', u'init', u'declarations', u'body', u'name', u'i']
[u'declarations', u'body', u'type', u'VariableDeclarator']
[u'id', u'declarations', u'body', u'type', u'Identifier']
[u'id', u'declarations', u'body', u'name', u'answer']
[u'body', u'type', u'VariableDeclaration']
[u'type', u'Program']