Wherein a drunk Abe needed a fast and easy way to turn a namespaced string into a nested dictionary.

namespaced_to_dict.py

string = "stats.pages.home_page.visitors"
split_string = string.split('.')
tree = {}
tree_string = 'tree'
 
for i in range(0, len(split_string)):
  try:
      tree_string = tree_string + '[split_string[' + str(i) + ']]'
      exec(tree_string)
  except KeyError:
      if i + 1 == len(split_string):
        set_tree = tree_string + " = 1"
      else:
        set_tree = tree_string + " = {}"
      exec(set_tree)
 
print tree