[Solved] How can I remove a key:value pair wherever the chosen key occurs in a deeply nested dictionary? [duplicate]

Question

Trick

The trick is to find out in advance whether a target_key is among the next children (= this_dict[key] = the values of the current dict iteration) before you reach the child level recursively. Only then you can still delete a key:value pair of the child level while iterating over a dictionary. Once you have reached the same level as the key to be deleted and then try to delete it from there, you get the error:

RuntimeError: dictionary changed size during iteration

Code

Thus, the code looks as follows:

import copy

def find_remove(this_dict, target_key, bln_overwrite_dict=False):
    if not bln_overwrite_dict:
        this_dict = copy.deepcopy(this_dict)

    for key in this_dict:
        # if the current value is a dict, dive into it
        if isinstance(this_dict[key], dict):
            if target_key in this_dict[key]:
                this_dict[key].pop(target_key)

            this_dict[key] = find_remove(this_dict[key], target_key)

    return this_dict

dict_nested_new = find_remove(nested_dict, "sub_key2a")

Credits

This is almost a copy of the spin-off How can I replace a key:value pair by its value wherever the chosen key occurs in a deeply nested dictionary?. But it took me a while to change that answer so that it would delete a key:value by its key. That is why I am sharing this, please mind that 95% of the credits go to the link!

The main added value over the “spun-off answer” is that you search for the target_key in the values in advance of entering the next recursion level by checking if target_key in this_dict[key]:.

Side note: Formatting the output

If you want to print or save the dictionary nicely, see How do I write JSON data to a file?.

Accepted Answer