Parsing of paths

Paths are often used in software environments: in file systems, in configuration files, in different IDs and so on. Here are two Python functions, used for parsing of them, they generate tracks from paths (function dothier()) and map based trees (function dottree()). Here you are:

def dothier(seq, sep='.'):
    """Generate path from dot-strings in order for creation
    tree: first - parents then children:
    >>> for x in dothier(["x.y.z", "a"]): print x, x.leaf
    a True
    x False
    x.y False
    x.y.z True

    Every returned string (unicode) has flag - leaf
    """
    # returns this, as unicode but with flag leaf
    _Node = type("dothier_node", (unicode,), {"leaf":False})

    seq = sorted(seq)
    mem = set()
    for p in seq:
        spl = p.split(sep)
        for ip in xrange(1, len(spl) + 1):
            pp = _Node(sep.join(spl[:ip]))
            if len(spl) == 1 or ip == len(spl):
                pp.leaf = True
            if not pp in mem:
                yield pp
                mem.add(pp)

def dottree(seq, sep='.', fullpath=False):
    """Returns dict of dicts like tree from sequence of dot separated strings.
    For example,
    >>> dottree(["x.y.z", "x.y", "a", "a.b.c", "a.b"])
    {'a': {'b': {'c': {}}}, 'x': {'y': {'z': {}}}}

    and

    >>> dottree(["x.y.z", "x.y", "a", "a.b.c", "a.b"], fullpath=True)
    {'a': {'a.b': {'a.b.c': {}}}, 'x': {'x.y': {'x.y.z': {}}}}
    """
    def ins(map, path):
        d = map
        parents = []
        for p in path:
            if fullpath:
                key = sep.join(parents + [p])
            else:
                key = p
            d = d.setdefault(key, {})
            parents.append(p)
    ret = {}
    seq = sorted(seq)
    for p in seq:
        pp = p.split(sep)
        if not pp:
            continue
        ins(ret, pp)
    return ret

Examples of usage are... in it's docstrings :) They are useful in GUI application: to construct tree or another hierarchical controls from paths (retrieved from config. files, for example).
This code is from my project "HMI pybase" (see Projects).