[Feature Request] Convert to dict

[re-young]

Hey,

It would be great to have the native ablilty to convert config into a dict.

yacs/yacs/config.py

Line 191 in 8a679b4

def convert_to_dict(cfg_node, key_list):

[DKandrew]

A follow up to this question, can we use CfgNode like dict? i.e. cfg['key'] can return the value of the key.

[DKandrew]

Here is my implementation (copied from the config.py)

_VALID_TYPES = {tuple, list, str, int, float, bool}


def convert_to_dict(cfg_node, key_list=[]):
    """ Convert a config node to dictionary """
    if not isinstance(cfg_node, CfgNode):
        if type(cfg_node) not in _VALID_TYPES:
            print("Key {} with value {} is not a valid type; valid types: {}".format(
                ".".join(key_list), type(cfg_node), _VALID_TYPES), )
        return cfg_node
    else:
        cfg_dict = dict(cfg_node)
        for k, v in cfg_dict.items():
            cfg_dict[k] = convert_to_dict(v, key_list + [k])
        return cfg_dict

[tekinengin]

For non-nested cfgNodes you can cast it into dict -> (dict)(your_cfgNode). Otherwise you need to do it recursively.

[mitchism]

Two points:

1. Simplest option: If you only wanted a native python dictionary, you could simply use the yaml package instead of yacs (or instantiate two copies of the config: first a CfgNode returned by yacs... second as a dict returned by yaml). Just load your .YML file like:
   import yaml
my_config_dict = yaml.load(open('/my_project/my_config.yml'), Loader=yaml.FullLoader)

2. Alternatively: Don't make any changes, just load your yacs CfgNode like normal, since the config object can be accessed either (a.) via Object-instance syntax, or (b.) via dict-key syntax. If you treat your yacs config as a dict, it should be operationally equivalent (exceptif your code uses type-checks! That's the one hiccup I can think of so far)