[bgschiller]

I also found myself doing that pretty often, so I wrote this:

    def nget(d, *ks, **kwargs):
        for k in ks:
            d = d.get(k)
            if d is None:
                return kwargs.get('default')
        return d

   >>> d = {'a': {'b': {'c': 12 }}}
   >>> nget(d, 'a', 'd', 'c', default='Not Found!')
   'Not Found!'
   >>> nget(d, 'a', 'b', 'c')
   12

[staz]

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