Robot framework: Retrieving keys that contain dashes from a dict - json

Question

I am new to Robot Framework and am trying to validate the contents of some JSON that is returned from a web service. The problem is that some attributes of the json objects have dashes in them and Robot doesn't seem to like this. I have something like the following
&{deployment} = list deployment ${deployment_name}
&{changeSets} = Set Variable ${deployment.ChangeSets}
&{myChangeSet} = Set Variable ${changeSets.my-change-set}
Should Be True ${myChangeSet.UseLocal}
Should Be Equal As Strings ${myChangeSet.Version} ${update_version}
But Robot fails on the 3rd line with the following error:
Resolving variable '${changeSets.my-change-set}' failed: AttributeError: my
I tried to escape the dashes but that still doesn't seem to work:
Resolving variable '${changeSets.my\-change\-set}' failed: SyntaxError: unexpected character after line continuation character (<string>, line 1)
I can't seem to find any information in the Robot docs with other ways to retrieve dict keys outside of the dot-notation. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

The use of dot notation is just a convenience. You can still access them the normal way (documented in the dictionary variables section of the user guide as &{NAME}[key]):
&{changeSets}[my-change-set]
Or, with extended variable syntax, which treats everything inside {} as a python expression:
${changeSets['my-change-set']}
Here is a working example illustrating these two methods:
*** Variables ***
&{changeSets} my-change-set=foo
*** Test Cases ***
Test 1
should be equal ${changeSets['my-change-set']} foo
Test 2
should be equal &{changeSets}[my-change-set] foo