Simple way to convert a string to a dictionary

Question

What is the simplest way to convert a string of keyword=values to a dictionary, for example the following string:

name=\"John Smith\", age=34, height=173.2,          


        

Answer 1

I think you just need to set maxsplit=1, for instance the following should work.

string = 'name="John Smith", age=34, height=173.2, location="US", avatar=":, =)"'
newDict = dict(map( lambda(z): z.split("=",1), string.split(", ") ))

Edit (see comment):

I didn't notice that ", " was a value under avatar, the best approach would be to escape ", " wherever you are generating data. Even better would be something like JSON ;). However, as an alternative to regexp, you could try using shlex, which I think produces cleaner looking code.

import shlex

string = 'name="John Smith", age=34, height=173.2, location="US", avatar=":, =)"'
lex = shlex.shlex ( string ) 
lex.whitespace += "," # Default whitespace doesn't include commas
lex.wordchars += "."  # Word char should include . to catch decimal 
words = [ x for x in iter( lex.get_token, '' ) ]
newDict = dict ( zip( words[0::3], words[2::3]) )