Your implementation suffer from a bug, if the final item is None it will return the default instead of None. A better implementation would be: def rget(d,

Your implementation suffer from a bug, if the final item is None it will return the default instead of None. A better implementation would be: def rget(d, *ks, **kwargs): for k in ks: if k not in d: return kwargs.get('default') d = d[k] return d